Masque
Masque (n): a form of amateur dramatic entertainment, popular among the nobility in 16th- and 17th-century England, which consisted of dancing and acting performed by masked players. Peter Smithson on the house of the future exhibition, 1956: “It was made like in the theater. It wasn't real. It was made of plywood. It was like an early airplane, where you make a series of forms, then you run the skin over them. The house was made in ten days. It was not a prototype. It was like the design for a masque, like theater. Which is extraordinary. Like all exhibitions, they live a life of say a week or four weeks in reality, but then they go on and on forever. Like the Barcelona Pavilion before it was reconstructed.”1 On the basis of Smithson’s description, the exhibition was a theoretical and architectural foray into how the house of the future could associate to its modernist roots rather than a true representation of a house in the future. It could be compared to Adolf Loos’ Villa Muller, 1930 for its theatrical quality and the voyeuristic tension between its rigid masculine exterior and organic feminine interior.2 This was further heightened by the presence of peeping holes that let the visitors observe the activities of the “unaware” domestic protagonists.