Found: Gregory Ain's Museum House

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2746?installation_image_index=6

Today in the New York Times, Eve Kahn breaks the story that Gregory Ain's house built for the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 has been ‘discovered’ in the town of Croton-On-Hudson, about 40 miles north of Manhattan. The story is excellent and I’m happy to have been included. Credit to George Smart for finding the house after digging deep in MoMA’s archive. What a wonderful surprise!

In my book Gregory Ain: The Modern House as Social Commentary (Rizzoli, 2008) I wrote at length about the museum house, and I labeled it “destroyed” in the appendix (p.249). On that fact, I was wrong! During the period of my research, MoMA’s full archive was unavailable while the museum was renovated by Yoshio Taniguchi. I also wrote of the house’s “dismantling” (p.199), because I was simply uncertain what had happened to the house, and because I knew the previous year’s house by Marcel Breuer had been moved piece-by-piece.

In any case, if I was wrong, I am happy to have been wrong! It’s a gift to architectural history that the house exists. I’m excited to visit it as soon as possible.

MoMA’s page about the exhibition house has links to original documents and images which have recently been digitized.

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The Times article mentions a forthcoming essay of mine. It is called “Gregory Ain: Under Surveillance,” to be published in the book Gregory Ain and the Construction of a Social Landscape, edited by Anthony Fontenot (MIT Press, Spring 2022). I wrote this in 2015, after requesting Ain’s FBI file through a FOIA request. I think it will be an eye-opener. Here’s the opening of the essay:

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A follow-up here: Gregory Ain: No Place Like Utopia