WHAT makes a house a home? The lives lived in it, of course. The relationship between people and their homes, sometimes passionate, sometimes indifferent, confounding or fraught, is the subject of “House & Home,” an exhibition that opened Saturday at the National Building Museum here. In photographs, films, models, timelines and nearly 200 artifacts (including a pink flamingo lawn ornament, a tortilla press, an early Apple home computer and a vibrator from the 1920s), all spread among six galleries, the show gamely asks some of the big questions: How have government policies shaped who lives where over time? Why do houses look the way they do? How does architecture affect individuals? How does it shape neighborhoods? What do we do at home? What is housework? What is play? And, finally, how do our homes express who we are, as well as who we’d like to be? “Many of us are familiar with the idea that our houses are reflections of our personality,” said Thomas Mellins, an architectural historian and independent curator, who organized the exhibition with Donald Albrecht, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York, and Sarah Leavitt, a curator at the museum. “In America,” Mr. Mellins continued, “we are very connected to this idea of individuality. Even if we do inherit a place to live, we are interested in personalizing it and having it express our innermost thoughts, desires, aspirations. What is less obvious or less known to most Americans is the way in which their houses reflect major economic changes, government policy, technological advances and consumer culture.” First, the setting. The National Building Museum lives in a brick palazzo-style monument that was built after the Civil War to do two things: house the United States Pension Bureau and hold events like inaugural balls. It’s been the home of the museum since 1980, a place to tell stories about the built environment. This being Washington, it is a monument with a capital M. It is mostly all atrium, a thunderously large interior with gargantuan Corinthian columns, a spectacular party space indeed (or an end-of-the-party space: Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered her concession speech here in 2008). The galleries live on the second floor, up wide and worn brick stairs (a gentle angle that was intended to accommodate Civil War soldiers on crutches). Having been walloped over the head with so much architecture, you have to recalibrate your eye to these more diminutive spaces, which at first feel underwhelming. The show begins pictorially, with two gallery walls blanketed with images harvested from the American Memory Association, historical societies, the Historic American Buildings Survey, and the Flickr universe. If the traditional American house is a single-family unit, these photographs show that, in reality, we are perhaps more likely to be living in public housing, penitentiaries, military barracks, gated communities and, yes, mansions, herded there by government policies both beneficial and devastating. There’s Graceland; a relocation center in California; the bungalows of the Rockaways; slave quarters on a Georgia plantation; a branded house by Martha Stewart for KB Homes; a West Virginia mining company’s housing; and a Lustron house. Nearby, in the center of this first gallery, dollhouses — a stately, chockablock Victorian and a peppy modern dream house designed by an architect for Woman’s Day magazine in 1976 — are outfitted with the decorating totems of the day (an ermine rug in the former, and ethnic masks and low-slung orange sofas in the latter). They make the point that ideas about style and aspiration, and an appetite for shelter magazines, are planted early in life. The huge collection of American stuff here — cultural artifacts that are by turns curious, kitschy, useful, soulful or disposable — suggests an eBay or flea-market bender. These specimens are organized thematically rather than chronologically, moving from the outside (a Baltimore painted screen door, a push lawn mower) in, and throughout the rooms of the house.
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