What should the modern house look like?

This simple question has been central, at least at some point, to the practice of almost every modern architect. There is hardly any other architectural commission that is more personal, loaded, and vulnerable than one’s own house. Architect and client are immediately entangled in one of the most intimate kinds of relationship―and not all such relationships end well. Architects are often accused of imposing their own visions of modern domesticity on their clients.¹ In fact, the history of almost every prominent modern house of the twentieth century involves some kind of face-off between architect and patron, as well as failed aspirations, unfulfilled wishes, conflicting agendas, misunderstandings, grudges, threats, and even lawsuits.² The full story is found not only in hand-drawn sketches, architectural models, and publicity photographs but also in the messier, less classifiable realm of the architectural process―in letters of complaint, in personal diaries, and in legal documents. It is in the in-between that the type of life enabled by a house is truly molded.

Take, for example, the Moriyama House in Tokyo (2002–2005), designed by Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa (born 1966). At first glance, its layout hardly resembles that of a typical house. Instead of a single architectural enclosure, the Moriyama House comprises ten prismatic volumes, meticulously arranged at right angles to one another and the site. As if mutually repelled by an invisible force, the volumes never touch. Made of thin sheets of steel, they are painted a clinical white. Every opening is square or rectangular, and precisely cut, as if with a scalpel. The architectural representations of the project give the same impression. For example, consider the three-dimensional model, which betrays no signs of life. There are no material choices, tectonic details, or human figures to be seen here. The whole arrangement could be easily misunderstood as sterile, scale-less, maybe even borderline inhumane. Who was this idea of domesticity dreamt up for? What purpose does it truly serve? The architect’s ambitions and fantasies or the client’s wishes and needs?

The client, Yasuo Moriyama, is a middle-age man who has never left Japan―or for that matter, his home city of Tokyo. In the early 2000s, he wrote to Nishizawa, asking the architect to design a house for him. Nishizawa is said to have responded, “You don’t need a house you need a village in a forest.”³ Although one may wonder if this was a professional recommendation or a diagnosis, Moriyama decided to go along with it. The architect’s design called for breaking an overall structure into “units,” which he simply ordered from A to I. Many of the separate parts serve a single function, such as that of living room (Unit C) or bathroom (Unit D).⁴ Five of them, however, are more complete in and of themselves; each including its own small kitchenette and bathroom, and thus functioning as an independent “mini-house.”⁵ Placing the units almost equidistant across the entire surface of the site allowed each mini-house to have its own small garden⁶―a space in which to plant vegetables, hang laundry, or do work out in the open.

At the time of the commission, Moriyama ran a liquor store. Yet all he really wanted to do was be at home, where he could immerse himself in his vast collections of cult films and musical recordings―and, above all, read.⁷ Renting out the five mini-houses on his plot would allow him to give up his store and to spend every day among his favorite things.⁸ When Moriyama’s mother, his only living family member, passed away in 2006, he was left alone in the world, with only his treasured dog to accompany him on regular visits to his family’s nearby cemetery plot.

Not long after, Moriyami rented out the five mini-houses in his “village.” Having been featured in numerous publications around the world, even before being completed, the project had achieved a certain cult status both inside and outside of Japan. Curious architects and students flocked to see it and to take pictures. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that most of Moriyama’s first tenants were younger architects from Nishizawa’s office, and an editor of a contemporary architecture magazine.⁹ Moriyama’s “village in the forest” soon resembled a designers’ colony. Following in Moriyama’s footsteps, many of his new neighbors began to work from home, blurring the line between life and work, solitude and togetherness. Moriyama’s daily life wasn’t impacted only by the architecture of the house, it now seemed also to be taken over by architects.

Soon, the neighborhood-like arrangement of ten parallelepiped mini-houses resulted in an unexpected social network: a new kind of semi-communal lifestyle. Whereas none of the individual units of the house were intended for communal use, Moriyama’s living room (Unit C) soon served as a kind of common room. There, residents often lunch together, enjoy a cold beer on a hot summer day, or screen a film from the roof. As Moriyami has put it, “This space gives you the freedom to do anything you like, and it makes you want to.”¹⁰ Similarly, the network of earth-covered alleyways between the units has become loci for everyday interactions―to chat, drink sake, or light fireworks.

The Moriyama House is an architectural device that facilitates mingling. Its composition encourages reclusive occupants to cross thresholds, to migrate, and to step outside their comfort zones, just by taking a few steps in one direction or another.¹¹ Every such outing is a short promenade across an urban microcosm.¹² In remaining within the bounds of the house for several days at a time, one still ventures outside―even if only briefly, when traveling from one unit to another. Along the meandering garden paths, one catches a glimpse of street life beyond the site of the house: a slow-moving scooter, the postman on his or her rounds, a woman dressed in a traditional kimono and rolling a plastic suitcase. The more one looks into this arrangement, the more its seemingly dismembered scheme becomes less of an architectural imposition and more of a communal life support for the solitary dwellers who have gravitated toward it.

Could it be that this “life in between” is not a mere side effect, but rather the active ingredient in an architectural prescription? In recent decades, the devastating effects of loneliness in Japan, especially among the elderly, have been identified as an urgent, public health concern.¹³ More and more people live by themselves, often without a family member or close friend nearby. Despite their proximity to one another, the mini-houses ensure a level of privacy, with the windows of one unit never directly facing those of another.¹⁴ The disarticulated layout of the Moriyama House thus can be understood as something other than a quirky architectural caprice. Rather, it is an exercise in domestic proxemics―or an experiment in a new type of familial structure―and as such, an architectural prototype for cohabitation, with individuals living alone, yet nonetheless together.

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“There is no living library that does not harbor a number of booklike creations from fringe areas. . . . some people become attached to leaflets and prospectuses, others to handwriting facsimiles or typewritten copies of unobtainable books; and certainly periodicals can form the prismatic fringes of a library.” —Walter Benjamin¹

In 1927, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the American art historian who would become the founding director of The Museum of Modern Art, embarked on an extensive European trip. Taking a break from teaching art history at Wellesley College, the twenty-five-year-old Barr saw this tour as an opportunity to study contemporary European culture and, on a more practical level, to collect bibliographic and visual material for his courses on modern art.² A major destination was the Bauhaus in Dessau, where Barr met with the school’s director and architect Walter Gropius, as well as its faculty, including the painter Paul Klee, and the photographer, typographer, and painter László Moholy-Nagy.

Barr was accompanied by Jere Abbott, a friend and fellow art history graduate from Harvard, who would become MoMA’s first associate director. While still in Germany, near the end of 1927, the two travelers decided to make an unplanned detour to Russia to witness firsthand its post-revolutionary avant-garde. Initially planning to spend two or three weeks in Moscow, they ended up staying and traveling across Russia for a month and a half.³ Anxious to preserve the information they gathered, both Barr and Abbott kept lively diaries of the plays they watched, the people they met, and the things they learned.⁴

Having recently visited the Bauhaus in Dessau, Barr was especially keen to see VKhUTEMAS (also spelled Vkhutemas), an acronym for the Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie (Higher state artistic and technical studios), in Moscow. In recent press and bibliography, the school is often reductively referred to as the “Soviet Bauhaus.”⁵ However, Vkhutemas faculty comprised some of the most pioneering Soviet artists of the time, including Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, and Gustav Klutsis, to name but a handful.⁶ Barr visited the Vkhutemas three times in January 1928. He actively sought to meet with faculty there to learn about their artistic practice and pedagogical activities, and to inform his own teaching of modern art back in the United States. Yet, his attempts were decisively hindered by language, as he did not know Russian.

Moreover, the most important obstacle for Barr in decoding the school and its pedagogy was its lack of printed matter: “The whole institution seemed painfully lacking in organization and equipment but the fine spirit of enthusiasm will conquer these technical difficulties with time and money. It was annoying, though, not to find any printed matter about the school, not even a list of professors or courses.”⁷ Unlike the Bauhaus—whose posters, brochures, postcards, and books were crossing borders around the world—Vkhutemas and its workings remained largely unknown in European circles, let alone North American ones.⁸

Faced with an impregnable fortress, Barr found a new mission in obsessively amassing as much printed material directly or indirectly related to Vkhutemas, its faculty, and its students as he could get his hands on. The disproportionate number of personal papers accumulated during his stay in Moscow betray an impassioned collector of Russian printed matter, characterized by what Walter Benjamin calls “the thrill of acquisition.”⁹ For Benjamin, who in 1926 had also felt frustrated spending a winter in Moscow, the most memorable items are acquired “on trips, as a transient.”¹⁰ Similarly for Barr, each piece of paper he gathered had its own story, promising to offer another small piece to the frustrating puzzle of the development of modern Russian art he felt unable to trace.

Barr’s and Abbott’s diaries from their Russian trip reveal their constant urge to compare and measure Vkhutemas against the Bauhaus. As Barr wrote about the Russian faculty of the former: “They were much interested in the Bauhaus and have evidently learned much from it. I asked [painter, critic, and administrator David] Sterenberg what were the chief differences between the two. He replied that the Bauhaus aimed to develop the individual whereas the Moscow workshops worked for the development of the masses. This seemed superficial and doctrinaire since the real work at the Bauhaus seems as social, the spirit as communistic as in the Moscow school.”¹¹ The Bauhaus is the only lens through which they seemed able to interpret the Vkhutemas, a riddling entity often understood as simply derivative.

Delving into Barr’s Russian trip library reveals an impressive variety and volume of material, amounting to more than sixty archival folders. In connecting the dots between Barr’s and Abbott’s diary entries and the dozens of items they brought back from their reconnaissance trip east, the seeming “disorder” of the archive begins to make sense. Every newspaper clipping, postcard, pamphlet, bulletin, travel guide, journal, exhibition catalogue and book reveals a brief moment of contact, a personal story, a rare glimpse into not only the faculty of Vkhutemas, but also the school’s “intersecting parallels” with the Bauhaus.¹²

NOTE

On January 3, 1928, Barr met with the architect, artist, designer, and typographer El Lissitzky, who taught architecture, interiors, and furniture design at Vkhutemas. Barr carried printed matter from the Bauhaus to Vkhutemas, and he delivered a handwritten personal note from Gropius to Lissitzky, entrusted to him a few weeks earlier in Dessau. Judging from the positive way in which the gesture was received, Barr assumed that Lissitzky “is evidently very friendly with the Bauhaus.”¹³ He reflected on Lissitzky’s “quite ingenious” book designs and photos, which he noted in his diary were, nonetheless, suggestive of Moholy-Nagy’s work at the Bauhaus.¹⁴ In 1927, the Vkhutemas had published one of its most important book-length publications, which, showcasing the work of the architecture faculty, features a cover designed by Lissitzky.¹⁵ Strangely enough, there is no evidence that a copy of it was shown or made available to Barr.

SKETCH

Lissitkzy must have also shown Barr and Abbott his audacious design forWolkenbügel (Cloud Iron), a network of “horizontal skyscrapers” positioned at major intersections across Moscow. Barr was quick to consider the proposition as “the most frankly paper architecture I have ever seen.”¹⁶ Abbott, on the other hand, rehearsed Lissitkzy’s paper architecture by sketching a perspective view of the daring cantilevered design under his diary entry for that day, and he noted that Lissitzky’s “work shows some influence of Bauhaus—but the feeling behind it is quite different . . . It is very interesting to see how careful these former painters are to repudiate painting.”¹⁷ A few days later, Abbott concluded that “Lissitzky gets many ideas from [the] Bauhaus but he is not a copyist.”¹⁸

“JUNK”

The afternoon of the same day, Barr and Abbott met with Aleksandr Rodchenko, who taught furniture design at Vkhutemas, and Varvara Stepanova, his “talented wife,” at their apartment.¹⁹Language was an obstacle once again, as these “brilliant, versatile artists” only spoke Russian.²⁰  As early as 1921, both Stepanova and Rodchenko had abandoned painting in order to fully devote themselves to photography, advertising, and textile design. A seemingly unsatisfied Barr insisted on looking at their older abstract paintings, which he was surprised to find “preceding the earliest geometrical things I’ve seen.”²¹ While impressed with their masterful photographs, Barr was determined to “find some painters if possible.”²² Recalling the incident from a different angle, Stepanova wrote: “Those Americans came to call: one of them dull, dry, and bespectacled—Professor Alfred Barr. . . . is interested only in art—painting, drawing. He turned our whole apartment upside down. They made us show them all kinds of old junk. Toward the end Barr got all hot and bothered.”²³

For Stepanova, Barr’s uptight character and inquiries were indicative of an academic who seemed stuck in a bygone idea of fine art and nonmechanical media: “I am absolutely not interested in this anymore . . . the soul is already filled with photography.”²⁴

TEXTBOOK

On January 19, 1928, Barr reconvened with Rodchenko, this time at the latter’s Vkhutemas workshop. Barr arrived loaded with questions, many of them regarding Rodchenko’s formative years as a painter, which the artist answered “in a rather disgruntled manner, insisting that the past bored him utterly and that he couldn’t remember at all when he had painted this way or that.”²⁵ Stepanova apparently answered on behalf of her husband, for she later chronicled in her diary: “Barr showed us a book on Russian art, in English, by [Louis] Lozowick. Everything was accurate—even the parts on the Constructivists—and there was a list of all their names. There’s an entire chapter on Rodchenko. Barr made us check it for accuracy . . . There turned out to be only one error: that Rodchenko had been a student of Malevich. This was pointed out to Barr, and the passage was underlined.”²⁶

The book, the accuracy of which Rodchenko and Stepanova were interrogated about, was Modern Russian Art.²⁷ Written by the Russian-born émigré artist Louis

Lozowick and published by the Société anonyme in New York in 1925, it was one of the very few English sources on modern Russian art of the twenties in circulation in the United States.²⁸ Barr was apparently so attached to it that he had taken his copy all the way across the Atlantic and then carried it through Europe all the way to Moscow, where he wrote down within it the dates on which he met with Russian artists and architects, all of whom appeared to be faculty members at Vkhutemas. For the far-flung art historian, these close encounters presented a rare opportunity not only to witness a foreign artistic scene but also, in the absence of an established bibliography, to fact-check the few existing accounts of its hitherto genealogy.

PHOTO

During another visit to Vkhutemas, on January 19, 1928, Rodchenko again welcomed Barr to his workshop. It is possible that it was on this very day that the artist gave Barr a gelatin silver print of one of his photographs that captures the snowy courtyard of Vkhutemas as seen from above on a sunny winter day. It is likely that Rodchenko had taken this picture from a balcony situated off his workshop at the Vkhutemas building on 21 Myasnitskaya Street, a site that served as a laboratory for his architectural photography. Rodchenko’s gift, later added to the MoMA collection as Barr’s gift, is part of his iconic series of sharp-angle shots depicting the school building’s balconies and service access ladders. One of these photographs also appears on the cover the first issue of Novyi lef (New left), a journal also designed by Rodchenko, a copy of which Barr made sure to bring back to North America.²⁹

PAMPHLET

Rodchenko’s photographic gift may have (briefly) transcended the language barrier with Barr, who attempted to scribble the former’s address at Vkhutemas in Cyrillic, along with other notes about Russian artists and publications in Latin script, on a yellow envelope.³⁰ The same could not be said about Tatlin, who was introduced to Barr at Vkhutemas on the same day. Tatlin had recently been appointed head of the school’s metal workshop and spoke with Barr in broken German. Barr was intrigued by the “very beautiful metal constructions” produced by Tatlin’s students, but he left empty-handed. Three days later, Barr was delighted to meet Russian modern art critic Nikolai Punin, who provided him with “a copy of his excellent monograph on Tatlin,” and possibly also his famous 1920 pamphlet on Tatlin’sPamiatnik III Internatsionala (Monument to the Third International), which would resurface a couple more times in Barr’s personal papers.³¹

JOURNAL

A few days before departing, on January 26, 1928, Barr also met with Moisei Ginzburg, a “brilliant, young architect” who taught at Vkhutemas.³² Ginzburg was a founding member of the Organization of Contemporary Architects (OSA) and a coeditor of the widely circulated architectural journal SA. Sovremennaia arkhitektura (CA. Contemporary Architecture). An illustrated article by Ginzburg on “constructivism as [a] method of laboratory and pedagogical work,” published a few months earlier in SA, is included, along with Walter Gropius’s design for the new Bauhaus building in Dessau and photographs by Lucia Moholy, among others. The appearance of the Bauhaus and its faculty on the pages of SA are testament not only to OSA’s admiration of the Bauhaus’s mission but also to the aspiration of many Vkhutemas architecture faculty members to engage in a critical dialogue with the German school’s faculty and ideas through publications, exhibitions, and even mutual exchanges of students.³³

CLIPPING

Ginzburg offered back issues of SA to Barr, who wrote in his diary of Ginzburg’s “excellent maquette for a workers’ apartment house and club.”³⁴ A few months after returning to the United States, Barr contributed an article titled “Notes on Russian Architecture” to the journal The Arts.³⁵ There, his initial appraisal of Ginzburg’s design is revised to question the project as “perhaps . . . influenced by Gropius’ building for the Deutsches Bauhaus at Dessau.”³⁶ Barr’s papers include a clipping from SA with plans for the project, which he kept in a white envelope annotated with explanations about the OSA and SA acronyms, most possibly to illustrate his article. His original reaction is self-censored, and the clipping remained unused. As former MoMA curator and Barr’s collaborator Elizabeth Jones later noted, “Architecture as practiced by the pioneers of modernism in the West provided a standard against which to judge the recent buildings in Moscow.”Jones, “A Note on Barr’s Contribution to the Scholarship of Soviet Art,” 53-54.

CATALOGUE

Perhaps the rarest item included in Barr’s Russian trip papers is one of the five thousand copies printed of the catalogue for the First Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture, which he obtained “from Moisei Ginzburg.”³⁷ Typeset in both Russian and German, this publication was designed by the artist and designer Aleksei Gan, one of the main theoreticians of Constructivism. Held inside the Vkhutemas building in the summer of 1927, the exhibition was organized by members of OSA and brought together works by Vkhutemas and Bauhaus students and faculty under one roof.³⁸ Even though the exhibition had closed a few months before his arrival, Barr made use of his copy of the catalogue to take notes on Moscow’s architects and buildings, many of which he later referenced in his “Notes on Russian Architecture.”

POSTCARD

Barr’s paper trail on modern Russian art continued to grow even after his return to the United States. One of the items sent to him from Moscow, in August 1928, was a postcard that, for the All-Union Spartakiada Sporting Event of 1928, was designed by Gustav Klutsis.³⁹ Klutsis, who initially studied with Malevich and graduated from Vkhutemas in 1921, taught color in the wood and metal workshop of the school from 1924 until 1930.⁴⁰ Barr must have already been familiar with his work as Klutsis had codesigned the cover of a 1927 issue of the Bulletin d’information, the weekly news bulletin of VOKS (Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries), which Barr had brought back in his suitcase from Moscow.⁴¹ However, this postcard was not sent by Klutsis or any other Vkhutemas faculty, but rather by Petr Likhachev, a nineteen-year-old interpreter who had spent enough time assisting Barr and Abbott in Moscow to distinguish Barr’s curiosity for any portable piece of paper on modern Russian art and design. Likhachev’s choice to send a postcard designed by a Vkhutemas faculty member thus can be read as deliberate gesture to contribute to his American friend’s towering collection of ephemera related to modern Russian art and architecture.

Throughout the Russian trip of 1927–28, Barr struggled to comprehend both the Vkhutemas faculty he met and any distinctive qualities of the school vis-à-vis its overshadowing sibling, the Bauhaus. Vkhutemas might have been less successful in the dissemination of its ideas and image through the circulation of printed media (let alone commercial products), but at the same time, its distinct place in the history of the twentieth-century avant-garde and its far-reaching impact through the education of literally thousands of Russian and Soviet students cannot be overestimated. Despite initially interpreting Vkhutemas as chaotic and derivative of the Bauhaus, as missing the “organizing genius” of Gropius, Barr gradually drew a more nuanced comparison, noting: “The important difference so far as I could discern lay in the fact that the aim of the Moscow school was more practical, its technique far less efficient; the aim of the Bauhaus more theoretical, its technique much superior. But with men such as Lissitzky and Tatlin and [painter and teacher Robert] Falk there is much in the future.”⁴²

In the years immediately following his trip to Russia, Barr established regular correspondence with members of the intellectual circles he had met in the fields of art, architecture, theater, and cinema, and he wrote numerous articles, published both in the United States and Russia, summarizing his evolving observations on both historical and contemporary Russian culture.⁴³

In later years, Barr claimed that the medium-specific structure of the Bauhaus workshops played a key role in conceptualizing his strategic proposal for MoMA’s media-specific, multi-departmental structure.⁴⁴ However, as he himself was first to point out in his Russian diary, a similar structure characterized Vkhutemas and included “painting, sculpture, architecture, printing (color and various processed), typography, graphic arts, furniture designing, advertising posters, and techniques of materials.”⁴⁵ During Barr’s directorship, works by Vkhutemas faculty—including Malevich, Lissitzky, Rodchenko, and Stepanova—entered MoMA’s collection for the first time (sometimes exported as “technical drawings” through Germany, or wrapped inside Barr’s umbrella to protect them from seizure by the Nazis).⁴⁶ His first few bumpy encounters with Rodchenko soon transformed into an exchange of letters, photographs, and ideas—and ultimately culminated in peaks, such as MoMA’s 1971 retrospective exhibition of Rodchenko’s work, to which Barr lent much of his own personal collection.⁴⁷

Unlike the Bauhaus, Vkhutemas as a pedagogical institution of global significance never made it into Barr’s infamous 1936 diagram interpreting the evolution of abstract art and cubism as a series of uncomplicated, one-way vectors that converge and diverge.⁴⁸ Neither did it receive the American exposure that Gropius’s school enjoyed through MoMA’s 1938–39 Bauhaus exhibition and (multiple reprints of) its accompanying catalogue.⁴⁹ Perhaps Barr’s contribution to shedding a light, albeit indirectly, on Vkhutemas might lie elsewhere, as his travels, ephemera collection, and writings did make available the ideas and artistic achievements of the Russian avant-garde for new audiences on the other side of the Atlantic. More than ninety years after Barr’s Russian trip, though, the continued Othering of the Vkhutemas does not only still hinder a rightful assessment of its original contributions in art and architecture, but also prevents us from considering its idiosyncratic, and only seemingly disordered pedagogical culture as an interpretation of modernity in its own right.

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