© 2004 by Design History Society
‘A Man's House is his Art’: the Walker Art Center's Idea House Project and the Marketing of Domestic Design 1941–1947
Independent Scholar, New York
Idea Houses I and II, two houses built by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1941 and 1947, were the first functional modern homes built by an American museum. The houses were conceived and built during an extreme housing shortage brought on by the Great Depression and exacerbated by the Second World War. Unlike commercial model homes of this period, these houses were designed by architects retained by the Walker, with furnishings and home products selected by the curatorial staff. Rather than product placement, the purpose of the exhibitions was to promote awareness and appreciation of modern home design by presenting the houses as source material for visitors' own potential building projects: literal houses of ideas. Through these exhibitions, the Walker also sought to re-imagine the museum experience as an active, participatory event, free of the elitist associations of the conventional museum, and in these cases focused on housing, the most pressing issue of the day. This paper examines the interrelated museological and architectural aspirations of these exhibitions in the context of the housing crisis of the 1940s. These twin goals of providing quality home design advice and reinventing the museum experience are what made the project popular in its day and interesting now. This paper examines the houses both as museum exhibitions and as houses, and investigates the complex interplay of commerce and the museum that is perhaps essential to discussion of the Idea Houses, considering that the overwhelming commercial influence on home design and furnishings was what inspired the project in the first place.
Key Words: domestic display—Federal Housing Administration—home decoration—Idea House—marketing—Walker Art Center