Snarkitecture is receiving an encore at the National Building Museum this summer. For the second time, the New York-based firm will design a temporary installation in the museum’s Great Hall for its annual Summer Block Party.
The 2018 exhibit, titled Fun House, will feature a freestanding house within which various reprises of the firm’s previous works will fill each room. The reiterated installations will continue outside of the site-specific structure, extending to fill the entire hall. The entirety of Fun House will be curated by Maria Cristina Didero.
Snarkitecture cofounder Alex Mustonen said the team of artists and designers were “excited” to return to the museum, and that their second summer exhibit would mark a unique chapter in their work as “the first exhibition looking back at past projects,” he said in the statement.
The three-person firm, founded in 2008, has a long history of designing immersive installations: in 2012 at Design Miami/ they filled a room with vinyl tubes to create a cave-like enclosure; the year before they filled Storefront for Art and Architecture’s New York gallery with EPS architectural foam and tunneled their way through; and then, in 2015, Snarkitecture designed the National Building Museum’s second Summer Block Party, turning the 10,000-square-foot Great Hall into a giant ball pit.
Now in its fifth year running, the Summer Block Party installation has featured architects such as Studio Gang (2017), James Corner Field Operations (2016), and Bjarke Ingels Group, which created a maze for the museum’s inaugural program in 2014.
Why is Snarkitecture getting another chance instead of a fresh face? For the museum’s executive director Chase Rynd, the firm is a natural choice to help achieve the program’s goal of “making architecture and design approachable and fun.”
“Snarkitecture really understands our mission of inspiring curiosity about the world we design and build,” said Rynd in the statement. “We know our visitors will be thrilled to immerse themselves in Snarkitecture’s world yet again.”