Building a dream house
MIT's Sass uses computer - and Crescent City inspiration - to create a prefab at MoMA
When Larry Sass played hooky in high school, he'd hang out at the Museum of Modern Art, contemplating Cezanne and Jackson Pollock. Now, the 44-year-old MIT professor and Harlem native is back at the museum, one of five architects exhibiting prefabricated houses in "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," on view through Oct. 20. We talked with him at his campus office, where he explained how he and his students - using only mallets - came to build their New Orleans-inspired shotgun cottage from 5,000 unique, computer-cut plywood and plastic pieces. While Sass, an expert in digital fabrication, hasn't priced mass production of the house, he thinks his design - with its lacey, decorative arched porch and peaked roof - could be a key to renewal in the Crescent City. - PAYSHA RHONE
You're one of the few African-American architects to exhibit at MoMA. What made you want to be an architect?
I grew up in the '70s. There was a lot of arson in New York City and a lot of poverty in Harlem. And I thought the best thing was to change the look of the neighborhood. At 12 years old, my uncle noticed I loved his Architectural Record magazines. And he bought me a T-square. And my father, who worked in an advertising agency, always brought me paper. And I loved drawing floor plans.
What did you see in your neighborhood that you wanted to change?
The worst part is that I had this image of modernism as the answer. I always thought that a building should be clad in glass and modern - they should look like the Trump tower. If you look at New York City, the big movement in architecture in the '70s and '60s was to create projects. Most people know the projects - the tall towers with small openings for windows. Those are great for the original purpose, which was to create housing for city workers. But once they were turned over to lower-income families and families from other places, absent was the cultural impact of being able to customize them and make them beautiful. So they became prisons for most people.
How did you shake off modernism?
I always had a modernist interest in architecture up until the time I had the opportunity to meet Frank Gehry. He used the computer to make these really complicated forms, but the process of using the computer was very simple. I wanted to make the complicated forms, but I still didn't like them, I felt like it was still an elitist thing. If you talk to the average person, they don't want to live in those buildings. They don't find them warm, they don't find them interesting. And there was a major person who inspired me to do the ornamentation . . . an artist by the name of Kehinde Wiley. He makes these huge paintings of black men in very robust, very macho positions. But in the background, there's always these kind of lacey wallpapers. So I tried to do the same thing.
How did you conquer MoMA?
The museum asked me to make a proposal and I think they were looking for something that was affordable. Because most of the proposals . . . were for high-end housing. Mine, in contrast, is always going to be lower and that's because I've eliminated some of the key measures of cost and construction, and that's measuring and cutting. It was 22 days to make the building, with three people. It's pretty simple.
You traveled to New Orleans with three students last year. Did you know you wanted to make a shotgun house?
I was going for inspiration. And I knew I was going to do a New Orleans house before the museum called. Three years ago, I did a project called the instant house. It was an 8-by-10-foot cabin made out of 111 sheets of plywood, all unique pieces, all numbered, all held together by friction - no nails, no screws, all cut by the machine.
You're into the broader application : housing for New Orleans?
Yes. When we visited, the one thing we saw that had the greatest impact was seeing rows and rows of FEMA trailers. Every trailer was exactly alike, every trailer was small and every trailer was impersonal. I was just blown away by the incredible poverty and how I could get anyone off the street to put together one of my houses.
What do you think people in New Orleans want to live in?
Especially African-Americans, we love bling and color and flair, it's a part of our culture. Two things drove me to think about ornamentation. One, we interviewed a woman, who was sitting on her porch in New Orleans, and she said that one thing she loved about her porch were all of the brackets and ornament. The second was the incredibly insulting Brad Pitt proposals that have these modernist boxes with a Cadillac in the driveway and black figures sitting outside in the boiling sun. And a lot of them do not have porches. It's because they don't have architectural review. You need people from the culture as part of the design process.
What's next?
There are two stages in my vision. The first is to relocate the project at the MoMA to New Orleans. We'll reinstate it in the Ninth Ward . . . and use it as a design center and have local people come in and design their own buildings. We want to make a new one that has bedrooms, bathrooms, a kitchen, but all the utilities are snap in. And the goal is to make the first digitally fabricated house in the United States in New Orleans by next summer, and put a family in it. New Orleans lost 109,000 houses. The only way to replace that is by machinery.
