Kindergarten Chats model

Stuart Cohen’s Kindergarten Chats project was shown in the debut exhibition of the Chicago Seven, an iconoclastic group of young architects who shared an interest in complicating the history of modern architecture, specifically the legacy of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Chicago. A ri on a book by architect Louis Sullivan of the same name, Cohen’s design explores architecture as set of essential signs—just as a child’s drawing might distill a house down to a square with a peaked roof, chimney, window, and door. Recalling architect and theorist Robert Venturi’s ideas about the production of meaning and symbolism in architecture, Cohen’s project attempts to express the “cultural image” of the single family American house. Behind the facade, however, the sterotypical idea of a house gradually gives way to a modernist structure with glass and metal framing serving as a primary, or neutral, space that is masked from the street by its conventional coding.