Ever since, and in no matter what style, material or culture, certain architects and enlightened or excitable patrons have aimed to do more or less what Palladio and Almerico did 450 years ago. A new exhibition at New York’s MoMA, Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture, “considers the single-family home and archetypes of dwelling as themes for the creative endeavours of architects and artists”.

Through engaging drawings, models, videos and installations, the show investigates the house as a means to explore architectural ideas that dovetail with the concerns of art. It also looks at the work of artists who have made the house a focus of their creativity, and by implication it raises the question admirably answered by Palladio and Paulo Almerico: can the house be a work of art?

The question is timely given that the problem of housing the world’s rapidly growing population has led to intense suburban sprawl along with the spread of shantytowns – not to mention homes and houses, whether cheap or costly, that are as far from art as the hillside favelas of Rio de Janeiro are from the salubriously populated slopes of Vicenza.

‘Ghosts in the house’

MoMA’s show focuses on the fusion of art and architecture over the past fifty years, rather than the previous 500. This is because this year is the 50th anniversary of the death of Frederick Kiesler, a visionary Austrian-American artist and architect, who worked closely with the museum in the late 1950s on a project for a house as radical as La Rotonda had been in the 1560s. This was the Endless House. It was only ever realised as a model, but what an extraordinary, mind-expanding thing it was, a flattened, organic spheroid containing free-flowing interior spaces expressing what Kiesler called Correalism, a design philosophy concerned with shaping a continuity of spaces, people, objects, concepts and art.

If this all sounds very ‘60s, in a way it was. Correalism and the Endless House were to influence architects like Frank Gehry, who in 1998 was the first recipient of the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and Art. Gehry’s epochal Guggenheim Bilbao museum had opened the previous year sealing the restlessly inventive Californian architect’s reputation in flowing folds of dazzling titanium. Twenty years earlier, Gehry had bought a modest Dutch Colonial-style house dating from 1920 in Santa Monica, conjuring it into a magical family home, all curious angles, workaday materials and, yes, a continuity (and fragmentation) of space, objects, concepts and art.