The National Building Museum has unveiled a new, interactive exhibition designed by Snarkitecture. Titled Fun House, it is the latest in the Museum’s imaginative Summer Block Party series of temporary structures inside its historic Great Hall.
Fun House is Snarkitecture’s first comprehensive museum exhibition, examining the prolific activities of the studio throughout the entire Great Hall. Curated by Italy-based Maria Cristina Didero, the heart of the exhibition is presented within a Snarkitecture-designed house—a freestanding structure that recalls and re-imagines the idea of the traditional home.
Fun House includes a sequence of interactive rooms featuring well-known Snarkitecture environments and objects, like Dig (2011) and Drift (2012), as well as new concepts developed for the Museum. As visitors walk through the house, the rooms convey the ten year story of Snarkitecture while underlining the studio’s peculiar, yet accessible way of reinterpreting the built environment.
In the Museum’s west court, or “front yard,” a custom recreation of A Memorial Bowing (2012), welcomes visitors into the space. Visitors exit the house towards the east court, or “backyard,” greeted by Playhouse (2017) and a kidney-shaped pool filled with hundreds of thousands of recyclable plastic balls, reminiscent of The BEACH (2015-17).
“Besides its symbolic value, the house stands for the basic icon in the field of architecture,” said Didero. “A simple and evocative concept, a house is the first thing most children learn to draw spontaneously, adding a triangle to a rectangular shape. In the occasion of Fun House, starting from the aforementioned simple outline, the conventional household is regarded and totally re-imagined to contextualize the unconventional theoretical journey of Snarkitecture’ s first decade of activities.”
“Fun House represents a unique opportunity for us to bring together a number of different Snarkitecture-designed interiors, installations, and objects into a single, immersive experience,” said Alex Mustonen, co-founder of Snarkitecture. “Our practice aims to create moments that make architecture accessible and engaging to a wide, diverse audience. With that in mind, we are excited to invite all visitors to the National Building Museum to an exhibition and installation that we hope is both unexpected and memorable.”
Fun House is the latest collaboration between the National Building Museum and Snarkitecture. In 2015, Snarkitecture created The BEACH, which covered 10,000 square feet of the Great Hall with nearly one million recyclable translucent plastic balls. The BEACH welcomed over 180,000 visitors over the span of eight weeks and remains one of the most popular National Building Museum exhibitions to date.
Complemented by a full schedule of programs and special events, Fun House runs through September 3, 2018. Fun House is part of the Museum’s Summer Block Party, an annual series of installations and events for visitors of all ages. Previous Summer Block Party collaborations include Hive by Studio Gang (2017), ICEBERGS by James Corner Field Operations (2016), The BEACH by Snarkitecture (2015), and the BIG Maze by the Bjarke Ingels Group (2014).