This Future Has a Past

Anyspace, the new pop-up architectural exhibition program of the Anyone Corporation, will launch on Tuesday, July 25, with This Future Has a Past, a multimedia installation by Katherine Lambert and Christiane Robbins that probes the mysterious fate of Gregory Ain’s 1950 Exhibition House for the Museum of Modern Art Garden. The show will occupy the Margaret Helfand Gallery of the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, from July 25 to September 12. It is presented in cooperation with the Center for Architecture. 

Anyspace will appear in different locations, attracting new audiences and creating a following as it moves around the city, whether independently or in cooperation with another New York institution. “For all of its cultural institutions, New York has little space for showing important architecture exhibitions that originate elsewhere. Anyspace will fill that void by bringing great small shows from across the world to the boroughs of New York,” said Cynthia Davidson, executive director of the Anyone Corporation.

This Future Has a Past was originally created by architect Katherine Lambert and director Christiane Robbins, of California, for Time-Space-Existence, a group exhibition at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. A look at one work by Ain, a midcentury Los Angeles modernist, the show offers a forensic rendering of MoMA’s 1950 “House in the Garden” series, curated by Philip Johnson. Included are records of FBI surveillance of Ain’s “un-American activities” and liminal images of a contemporary model of the commissioned Exhibition House. Ain, known for his community-based housing, was asked to design a house tailored for the middle-class American family to be shown in the MoMA series, following criticism of Johnson’s selection of “elitist” Marcel Breuer to design the first house in 1949.

While the Breuer house was purchased by Nelson Rockefeller and moved to his estate in upstate New York, there is no record of what happened to Ain’s Exhibition House. If its disappearance was due to Ain’s politics is unknown: J. Edgar Hoover regarded Ain as “the most dangerous architect in America.” Recently, Barry Bergdoll, a curator of architecture at MoMA, discovered the original 1950 model of the house and acquired it for the MoMA collection. The model will be exhibited parallel to Lambert and Robbins’s installation—making it available to view for the first time in more than 50 years.

“We are beginning the Anyspace exhibition series with Ain to offer a timely look not only at the role of the FBI in this country but also at one aspect of the history of New York’s leading collector of architectural projects. It is a bicoastal history, and mystery, little known until now,” said Davidson.

Anyspace is made possible in part by a grant from the Graham Foundation.
 

Admission: Free and open to the public
Hours: Monday–Friday 9am–8pm, Saturday 11am–5pm

About Anyone Corporation
Anyone Corporation is a New York–based nonprofit architecture think tank established in December 1990. Its purpose is to advance the knowledge and understanding of architecture and its relationships to the general culture through international conferences, public seminars, exhibitions, and publications that erode boundaries between disciplines and cultures. Anyone Corporation is also the publisher of ANY (Architecture New York) magazine (1993–2000), ANY books (1991–2000), and Log (2003–present) and produces the Writing Architecture series of books (1995–present) with MIT Press. In 2016, the Anyone Corporation co-curated the US Pavilion for the Venice International Architecture Biennale.

General information
Anyone Corporation
41 West 25th Street, Floor 11
New York, NY
10010
www.anycorp.com

Contact
Carly Richman, Curatorial Assistant
anyspace [​at​] anycorp.com / T 212 645 1400