First glimpse: Snarkitecture's “Fun House” for the National Building Museum this summer

After their wildly successful “THE BEACH” ball pit in 2015, Brooklyn-based Snarkitecture was invited once again to design the National Building Museum's Summer Block Party 2018 installation with “Fun House”, which will take over the Museum's Great Hall. Opening on July 4, Fun House will be an interactive installation and exhibition that reflects on Snarkitecture's first decade as a studio, while underlining their playful reinterpretations of everyday objects and environments. 

Read on for more.

Fun House reimagines ideas of the traditional home. Visitors enter the house in the Museum's west court by going through a “front yard”, which will be a recreation of Snarkitecture's “A Memorial Bowing” (2012). 

Inside the house, the exhibition — curated by Maria Cristina Didero from Italy — will be set in a sequence of interactive rooms displaying Snarkitecture's well-known environments and objects, like “Dig” (2011) and “Drift” (2012), and other new concepts they designed specifically for the Museum.

“Besides its symbolic value, the house stands for the basic icon in the field of architecture. A simple and evocative concept, a house is the first thing most children learn to draw spontaneously, adding a triangle to a rectangular shape,” Didero describes. “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.”

Visitors then exit the house towards the “backyard” in the Museum's east court, where they'll find the “Playhouse” (2017) and a kidney-shaped pool filled to the brim with thousands of lightweight recyclable plastic balls, a nod to Snarkitecture's “THE BEACH” (2015-17).

“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 Snarkitecture co-founder Alex Mustonen in a statement. “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.”

In recent years, previous Summer Block Party collaborations include the “Hive” by Studio Gang (2017), “ICEBERGS” by James Corner Field Operations (2016), and Bjarke Ingels Group's “BIG Maze” (2014).