House & Home
Opening April 28, 2012
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Home: it can be our most significant investment or only a dream.
Throughout American history, people have lived in all sorts of places. Military barracks; two-story colonials; nursing homes; tenements; homeless shelters; skyscrapers: houses of all kinds dot our landscape and continue to be home for new generations, long after the original residents have moved away. House & Home takes visitors on a sweeping tour of America’s residential landscape, in all its complexity.
The National Building Museum, with its emphasis on educating the public about the built environment, is uniquely positioned to present this exhibition. Designed by the award-winning Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the exhibition begins with a breathtaking array of photographs of American houses. Visitors then move through several galleries filled with artifacts, models, and films. House & Home concludes with a gallery of changing exhibitions exploring themes from the artist’s view of home to the kitchen of the future.
Living at Home: A dramatic display of hundreds of household goods used over the course of the past several centuries includes a butter churn; a poster of Farrah Fawcett; a chest of drawers made in a Japanese internment camp; a fondue set; and a hand-painted screen door. Each item tells its own story of how a house becomes a home.
Building a House: Five examples of different types of household construction allow visitors to touch the building materials, open windows, and view cross-sections. Explanatory labels showcase the changes over time from an
adobe home to a condominium building with a glass-curtain wall, while explaining the popularity of different types of construction in certain regions and time periods.
Buying a Home: An interactive timeline introduces visitors to the origins of our modern mortgage system as well as other milestones in the history of home ownership. An 1860s homestead claim and a photograph of a 1930s couple signing a government mortgage with an “X” help tell this story and link the laws and regulations concerning home ownership to the current economic situation.
Models: Commissioned scale models of 14 iconic American homes run down the center of the gallery space, delighting visitors who recognize such special buildings as Mount Vernon and the John Hancock Center. Photographs
complementing the models show how Americans used ideas from these famous structures to design their own more modest homes.
Film: A series of six films use historical photographs to animate the daily tasks such as laundry and cooking that make a home work. In another gallery, a large-scale two-screen film presentation takes visitors inside a variety of contemporary architect-designed homes. In the final gallery, interviews with developers, contractors, and real-estate agents give visitors a different kind of look at six communities.
Education Programs: School and youth education courses, lectures and workshops for adults, symposia for building professionals, and festivals for visitors of all ages will complement House & Home.
Sponsorship Opportunities
For more information about House and Home sponsorship opportunities, click here or contact Kate Haw, Vice President for Development, at 202.272.2448,ext. 3907 or khaw@nbm.org.
