House and Home

As its succinct title implies, “House and Home” at the National Building Museum (nbm) is about two related but discrete subjects: the structures in which people live and the concepts of comfort, utility, individuality, space, consumption, and taste that inform how they do so. This distinction serves as the installation's organizing principle and is a good example of the museum's characteristic integration of architectural design with social and cultural histories. Even so, the success of this exhibition—which manages to be thorough without attempting to be comprehensive—lies in its ability to clarify these topics as areas of exploration and to suggest how the two are not so easily separated. The nbm curator Sarah A. Leavitt describes two exhibition goals. The first is to showcase the variety of American residential architecture over time, place, and function (with the last criteria exemplified by the shrewd inclusion of dormitories and penitentiaries). The

Aesthetics · Architectural engineering · Art · Consumption (sociology · Exhibition · Function (biology · Inclusion (mineral · Interior architecture · Social science · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Taste · Variety (cybernetics · Visual arts · Architecture · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Engineering · Psychology