150 South Cottage Hill Ave / The Fourth Resident
2019
A 2-month exhibition and stay in Mies van der Rohe's McCormick House, which had been originally built as a residential prototype for affordable prefab housing in 1952 but was relocated to and incorporated into the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL, in the 1990s when the museum opened.
The exhibition included Exquisite Corpse an oversized 260-piece card game that was available to visitors for open or rule-based play. Additionally, a series of events took place that included presentations by art historians Leili Adibfar (PhD candidate), Nicoletta Rousseva, Chris Reeves, and designer Norman Teague, as well as a performative text piece by artist Julietta Cheung, textile works by designer Kate Park, and site-related sound works by media artist and composer Olivia Block.
Since the McCormick House lacked a kitchen and functioning bathroom I had to expand its floorplan to surrounding buildings in Elmhurst, including a YMCA, to create a livable situation.
The McCormick house on its original property, 299 Prospect Ave, Elmhurst, IL, in the 1950s (Source: Hedrich Blessing Archive / Chicago Historical Society)
The McCormick House after it had been relocated to the Elmhurst Art Museum at 150 South Cottage Hill Ave, Elmhurst. Photograph: Jim Prinz
Installation view; all objects and furniture were provided by the artist except for MR chair that belongs to the museum. Photograph: Jim Prinz
The roles of objects were fluid, moving between furnishing and art, accommodation and improvisation
Former kitchen area; Untitled (Stainless Steel), 2019, 30 in. x 60 in x 2 in., rare earth magnets, wire, wood dowel
Card from the Exquisite Corpse card set, posted on the Untitled piece. See all cards.
Exquisite Corpse, a 260-piece card set specifically created for the house. It consists of four categories: House, Social Contexts, Ephemerals, and Discourse; the photograph shows the Discourse cards laid-out in a grid
A small publication, McCormick House Exquisite Corpse, which documented visitors' engagement with the cards, was released on the closing weekend of the exhibition.
A museum visitor engages with the Exquisite Corpse cards
Exquisite Corpse card arrangement left behind by visitors
A checklist provided visitors with information on all elements that I had installed in the house (the checklist was updated with every re-arrangement)
The McCormick House at night with the Children's Wing illuminated
Commissioned by Robert Hall McCormick III, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the McCormick House as a prototype for affordable prefab housing in Elmhurst, Illinois, in 1952. Three families lived in the house before it was acquired in 1994 by the friends of the Elmhurst Art Museum and relocated to its grounds. The relocation required that the two wings of the prototype were separated, put on trucks and moved. When the house was placed on its new site and reconstructed, original and new materials were mixed, floorplans changed, and the structure turned 90 degrees. In its new role at the museum, the house first served as an office and only later was turned into an exhibition space for projects across contemporary art, design, and architecture.
150 South Cottage Hill Ave is the current address of the McCormick House. It is also the title of my exhibition, for which I temporary moved into the space to collapse the role of the museum with that of a home, complicating the relation between art, architecture, and the status quo, as well as between art and life.
Ahead of the exhibition I created the card game Exquisite Corpse, which would be available to visitors. The game consists of 260 cards and is organized into five categories: "House" (archival and current photo documentation of the building, its interiors and former residents), "Discourse" (keywords collected from seminal texts addressing modernist architecture), "Contexts" (materials that serve as social commentary), "Ephemerals" (a selection of words that carry a fugitive nature), and "Action Cards" (cards with special rules when used with one of the proposed game structures).
Parallel to this exhibition, an installation by artist Assaf Evron was on view in the second wing of the McCormick House. Both exhibitions were part of the Year of German-American Friendship initiated by the German Federal Foreign Office and the Goethe-Institut, and supported by the Federation of German Industries (BDI). Generous support for the exhibitions had also been provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
For a more detailed documentation visit: