Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley’s ReActor

THE RITUALS OF DOMESTICITY have long been a focus for cutting-edge practices in both art and architecture. Examples abound: Architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio slyly subverted the politics of gender and labor underpinning household chores in their Bad Press: Housework Series, 1993–98, which included a set of men’s dress shirts pressed into bizarre shapes according to “Instructions for a Dissident Ironing”; artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins literally recalibrated the topography of the domestic landscape in their 2008 Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa), which sought nothing

print February 2005

THE NEW MoMA

SINCE ITS FOUNDING IN 1929, The Museum of Modern Art in New York has been a beacon of modernism, acting as a singular advocate and home for some of the most significant works of art made over the last 125 years. Although scores of museums devoted to modern and contemporary art have sprung up around the world, for many of us MoMA will always be the Museum of Modern Art, indisputably worthy of the definite article preceding its name. But with this preeminence comes a heightened level of scrutiny, and one of MoMA’s most important functions—along with the presentation of its incomparable collection