Celia L. Marriott Apartment, Chicago, Illinois, Isometric

The Painted Apartment was designed as a spatial experiment for an art collector who asked the architects to design an apartment that would allow her to live within a painting. Instead of incorporating works of art as discreet objects on walls or pedestals, this modern design follows in a long tradition of artist- and architect-designed spaces as immersive spaces for art, or Gesamtkunstwerk, including Art Nouveau interiors or Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau. Here, Krueck created a series of screens and built-in, biomorphic furniture to create a dynamic division of space in the apartment. Through the layering of perforated metal screens, glass block walls, and veils of painted dots on glass walls and the floor, surfaces appear to merge and flow, a quality that is emphasized in this remarkable ink presentation drawing of the space. Like work by László Moholy-Nagy, the Painted Apartment can be viewed as a large work of kinetic art, or an environmental machine for art.