How Should We Live? Propositions for the Modern Interior at The MoMA

How Should We Live? explores the complex collaborations, materials, and processes that have shaped the modernist interior, with a focus on specific environments—domestic interiors, re-created exhibition displays, and retail spaces—from the 1920s to the 1950s. The exhibition brings together over 200 works, drawn from MoMA’s Architecture and Design collection as well as the Library, Drawings and Prints, Painting and Sculpture, Film, and Photography. Rather than concentrating on isolated masterworks, attention is given to the synthesis of design elements within each environment, and to the connection of external factors and attitudes—aesthetic, social, technological, and political—that these environments reflect.

 

The exhibition looks at several designers’ own living spaces, and at frequently neglected areas in the field of design, including textile furnishings, wallpapers, kitchens, temporary exhibitions, and promotional displays. Highlights include recent acquisitions from projects directed by major women architect-designers—Eileen Gray furnishings for the house E-1027 (1929), and Charlotte Perriand’s study bedroom from the Maison du Brésil (1959), for example. Designs from other noted partnerships include Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe’s Velvet and Silk Café (1927), Grete Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen (1926–27), and collaborations between Aino and Alvar Aalto, Ray and Charles Eames, Florence Knoll and Herbert Matter, and Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier.

Start Date

October 1, 2016

End Date

April 23, 2017

Hours

10:30 AM - 05:30 PM

Address

MoMA 11 West 53rd Street New York, NY 10019

Event Type

Ticketed

More Information

The MoMA

[contact-form-7 id=”298″ title=”Contact form”]