Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life
2004 European City of Culture
September 4–November 28, 2004
Walker Art Center
725 Vineland Place
June 8–September 7, 2003
Carnegie Museum of Art
4400 Forbes Avenue
November 8, 2003–February 15, 2004
The exhibition’s title suggests yet another dreary walk down the path of tweaked vernacular expression, but the show’s actual subject seems far more ambitious. Curator Andrew Blauvelt has assembled forty projects drawn from the fields of contemporary architecture and design, including a porcine skyscraper by MVRDV; a coat that transforms into a tent, by Moreno Ferrari; and Marcel Wanders’s charming vases based on 3-D mapping of sneezes. Collectively, the disparate projects argue that avant-garde design today isn’t about building a better mousetrap but questioning the need to trap mice in the first place.
