Recently Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum had some interesting exhibitions which included House Proud: Nineteenth-century Watercolor Interiors from the Thaw Collection (House Proud) and Solos: Tulou/Affordable Housing for China (Tulou). Both of the exhibitions are about living space but were presented quite differently. The concept of the House Proud was its interior design in the nineteenth century; it glorified the house as a source of pride, aristocratic power and status. However, in contrast Tulou incorporated 245 affordable apartment units for the low income people to live in. The big difference in the concept of living between these two exhibitions was very clear.
I was told by the female tour guide that the Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum was not built for a museum. It was home of the US Steel Corporation’s owner, Andrew Carnegie. Since he was an upper class gentleman, his house had the same concept as the House Proud. The house has a big and tall Iron Gate, huge windows, high ceilings and a broad stairway. Overall the house has a lot of open space and is big enough to have a party inside. The museum is the perfect imitation of the very painting being displayed. Nothing is better than seeing the House Proud paintings while in the rooms of a House Proud itself. The first painting I saw is The Circular Dining Room at Carlton House, London; Charles Wild (English, 1781–1835); England, 1819; the room has a tall ceiling with just few pieces of furniture against of the wall. While I was moving to see other paintings I realized that they started to develop more of a concept of a room. They have more furniture in each room and we can recognize whether it is a living room, a working room or a lady’s music room by its decoration. And most of these rooms have big open space, a hard wood floor or carpeted floor, luxury chandeliers the paintings but mostly in warm colors such as red and orange. The rooms are open without any closed doors with bright light coming from the window. The houses present the royal and aristocratic tastes in furnishing of the middle class. The curator of the museum installed real furniture in the exhibition that looks like ones in the paintings. It is good to compare the furnishings in the paintings with the real ones because we can see the material in detail. One of the paintings, I remember, has a bed with animal fur on it, books in a book shelf, pens on the table, a vase on the piano and a little kitten sleeping on the chair. I want to live in one of these beautiful and luxurious House Proud rooms.
In contrast, the Solos: Tulou/Affordable Housing for China is more focused on saving space and comes with no decoration on the plain white wall. Tulou was built for the people who moved from villages and wanted to make a living in a city. The museum presented the fifth installment of the Solos series and a prototype for affordable housing being built in the city of Guangzhou. The Tulou are in round shapes with 7 floors that looks like stadiums with a dormitory, a small hotel, shops, a gymnasium, a library, and various communal and public spaces. For the exhibition at Cooper-Hewitt, there is a living room floor plan on the floor and a full-scale bedroom in order for visitors to fully experience the spatial interior. There is a picture of a young man on the wall using a computer in this small room in the exact same scale. When I first got into the room, I felt stressed and uncomfortable because the room is too small, the TV set is thick and small and the music from the video is annoying. I am not sure if the curator intentionally intended to make visitors have these kinds of discomforting feelings in the small room. The music from the video kept repeating the same low pitch tone every 5 seconds. The video about the Tulou is horrible; the scenes sometimes pass too fast, or sometimes pass too slow. It forced me to leave right away.
In conclusion, the House Proud: Nineteenth-century Watercolor Interiors from the Thaw Collection (House Proud) and Solos: Tulou/Affordable Housing for China (Tulou) are about people’s living conditions. The house proud is focusing on the imperial style and statue of a class. The Tulou is focusing on saving space for people to have shelter. The exhibitions reflect the impact that a person’s economic situation can have on the type and style home that they live in.