ARCH 672/692 + MUD 732 S/F 2025
ARCH 672 - PROPOSITIONS
FALL 2025House of the Future/Exercises in Style
Alison and Peter Smithson’s 1956 House of the Future presents a carefully constructed narrative involving not only spaces of living (for a distant future of 1981), but a Gesamtkunstwerk also proposing furniture, fashion (worn by the actors shown ‘living’ in the house), and even typography. Though stylish, witty, and inventive, in the Smithsons’ envisioned future, the house acts as a bunker against the hostilities (known and unknown) of the outside world (an outlook fueled by the Smithsons’ own Cold War fears, but also one not unfamiliar almost 70 years later), but the story they tell, and the manner in which they share it draws us in by their commitment to an idea, and the joy that propels them to design, to care, and to imagine. This was just one of their many ideas for new ways to elevate the single-family house out of the diminished expectations of suburbia, and their experimentation with the ‘art of inhabitation.'
In this studio, we picked up where the Smithsons left off, and in taking on the challenge of how and where design ideas arrive, we learned from Raymond Queneau’s 1947 literary experiment, Exercises in Style - in which he told the same story in 99 distinctly different ways. Queneau’s model was adapted in order to examine, experiment, and discover architecture, and the ramifications of pursuing it with distinctly different ‘takes’ of reinvention (not repetition), where one thing leads to another while simultaneously holding its own. With the House of the Future as the subject at hand, students were asked to harness this playfully serious process, toward quick thinking, adept production, and agile architectural creations.