Ben van Berkel, Caroline Bos Moebius House, Het Gooi, The Netherlands (Scale model) 1993–1999

  • Not on view

In 1993, a young couple commissioned van Berkel and Bos to design “a house that would be acknowledged as a reference for the renovation of the architectural language.” It took the architect six years to fulfill his clients’ wishes, creating a groundbreaking structure out of the interconnected geometries of a Möbius strip. The house is spatially organized so that different aspects of a family’s private life—sleeping, working, playing, and eating—may or may not intersect. The scheme is programmed with specific adjacencies and times in mind, expressing how two people with their own routines may also share moments, or even reverse roles. The wire model emphasizes this diagrammatic quality. Twisting endlessly on itself, Moebius House is a highly specific solution for a contemporary lifestyle, a response to the historical and political aspiration of architects to express the zeitgeist of their time.

Gallery label from 9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design, September 12, 2012–March 25, 2013.
Architectural firm
UN Studio Van Berkel & Bos
Medium
Metal, wood, plywood, polyurethane, and acrylic
Dimensions
8 1/4 x 66 x 13 3/4" (21 x 167.7 x 35 cm)
Credit
David Childs Purchase Fund
Object number
2383.2001
Copyright
© 2023 UN Studio Van Berkel & Bos / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / PICTORIGHT, Amsterdam
Department
Architecture and Design

Installation views

We have identified these works in the following photos from our exhibition history.

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].