How Should We Live?

Exhibited at MoMA, How Should We Live? explores the complex collaborative partnerships, materials, and processes that have shaped the modern interior.

With “How Should We Live? Propositions for the Modern Interior”, The Museum of Modern Art examines a range of environments – domestic interiors, exhibition displays, and retail spaces – with the aim of exploring the complex collaborative partnerships, materials, and processes that have shaped the modern interior.

How Should We Live? Propositions for the Modern Interior, installation view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2016 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Martin Seck — How Should We Live? Propositions for the Modern Interior, installation view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2016 The Museum of Modern Art

Bringing together a number of recent acquisitions by the Department of Architecture and Design of work by major women architect-designers, How Should We Live? looks at several designers’ own living spaces and at frequently neglected areas in the field of design, including textile furnishings, wallpapers, kitchens, temporary exhibitions, and promotional displays.

Divided into three chronological groupings – the late 1920s to the early 1930s, the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, and the late 1940s into the 1950s – the exhibition brings together over 200 objects in total, but highlights a number of large-scale interiors including Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen (1926-27), Reich and Mies’s Velvet and Silk Café (1927), and Perriand and Le Corbusier’s study bedroom from the Maison du Brésil (1959).