The House In The Museum Garden: Targeting Domestic Consumers In MoMA’s Architecture And Design Exhibitions

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) promoted modern art and design through exhibitions. Exhibitions of the 1930s were marked by politically and socially minded intentions that aimed to solve modern problems through modern solutions. This continued into the early 1940s, though a shift occurred in the purpose of exhibitions in the late 1940s and 1950s. Working with prominent architects, designers, retail establishments, and women’s magazines, MoMA promoted modern architecture and design to American consumers as a way of living, fully embodied in the House in the Garden exhibitions, discussed at length here. The notion of viewer experience in exhibition design, the role of the homemaker in modern architecture, histories of modern architecture, design, magazines, politics of World War II, and the Cold War are important in the formation of this argument. This thesis asks and answers questions about shifting motivations in MoMA’s architecture and design exhibitions at mid-century.