The un-private house.

An important exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York examines the nature of the individually designed house at the end of the millennium.

Although for more than a century the house has been seen as the locus of architectural invention, thanks to its scale, relative freedom from restrictive codes, and intimate relation between designer and client, recent attention has shifted to more public structures, particularly those for institutions, whether cultural or governmental. Many architects, once they have achieved recognition, leave the humbler commission to less seasoned contenders. Terence Riley, however, in his exhibition (at the Museum of Modern Art New York, until 5 October) and its accompanying catalogue (Harry N. Abrams, $29.95), seeks to return the spotlight to contemporary houses as a 'collective bellwether', arguing that the 'private houses discussed here, and the architects who designed them, can be seen as not only reconfiguring the domestic landscape but laying the groundwork for the first architectural debates of the twenty-first century'.

Riley's provocative title, 'The Un-Private House', is based on the premise that after four hundred years of sheltering occupants from the public realm and reinforcing the rituals of (nuclear) family life, new social patterns, and innovative technologies that encourage the generation and construction of hitherto inconceivable forms, have radically transformed domestic architecture. The leitmotif is the impact of electronic media and digitization (including CAD) on dissolving boundaries, effortlessly engaging dwellers with the world outside in cyberspace, and permitting complex and dynamic spatial configurations that eschew rigid separation of functions within the house. In formal terms, Riley is particularly interested in investigations based on topology and the employment of geometrical strategies like the Mobius strip, which produce 'blobs', 'one of the two most influential contemporary types'; the other is the 'box', based often on a reworking of the Miesian aesthetic.

It is telling that only 15 of the 26 entries have been executed, and of these three are renovations of existing dwellings and three are flats. An additional five are scheduled for construction while six will remain unbuilt. Although the luxury and scale - the largest is Herzog and de Meuron's 20 800sq ft (1914[m.sup.2]) residence/media museum in the Napa Valley, due for completion in 2000 - as well as the programmatic idiosyncrasy of most of the examples disqualify them as models, three modest and more generally applicable projects could be profitably replicated: Michael Bell's 900sq ft (83[m.sup.2]) 'Glass House @2[degrees]', MVRDV's pair of 200[m.sup.2] row houses on an Amsterdam canal, and the 179[m.sup.2] 'Curtain Wall House' in Tokyo, 1993-95, by Shigeru Ban, based on the delightful conceit of a literal curtain, and glazed facades that 'can be opened and closed to alter the view and environmental effects such as light and wind'. An urban version of the Villa Savoie, it recasts a modernist icon in traditional Japanese terms.

The selection is geographically skewed: 16 projects are for US consumption, four for Dutch; two are in Japan, while England, France, Belgium and Argentina each account for one. The 'Digital House' by the Hariri sisters, with its prefabricated 'plug-ins' and concept of 'the house as an extension of the body' (shades of Archigram) is destined for no- or every-where, the patron being House Beautiful. And, except for the elegant models that give texture and tangibility, the exhibition itself could be satisfactorily viewed via the Internet.

For this reviewer, the most successful choices reinterpret familiar solutions, whereas those unique and often eccentric designs that challenge existing domestic paradigms are less convincing. Nevertheless, attention to Riley's thoughtful ruminations in the catalogue on the cultural and philosophical role of the house at the dawn of the new millennium will reward all who are engaged with the problems and promises of this seminal building type.