The Snarkitecture Fun House opens at the Building Museum

Pinkeye hit the National Building Museum in 2015, at least two weeks after the release of "The Beach". At least one of the visitors said that she had caught the virus during the spectacular summer season of the DC museum. Hard to prove, but easy to believe, since the attraction was a magnet for germs: a gigantic ball pit, filled with 750,000 plastic balls.

The risk was worth it, many visitors decided. "The Beach" – designed by New York's three-man design collective Snarkitecture – attracted over 183,000 visitors during its two-month run. This places the exhibition in a category apart in the history of the museum. "The Beach" cemented the Building Museum's annual architectural madness series as a summer rite.

Since then, the museum has featured "Icebergs" by James Corner Field Operations and "Hive" by Studio Gang, smaller shows that were not laser-targeted on the K-5 demographic. This year, the beach is back and there is a whole beach house.

A retrospective of Snarkitecture's work since 2010 was inaugurated at the Building Museum on July 4th. "Fun House" is much bigger than "The Beach." The massive structure of the house features 40 different objects and installations, from a Rube Goldberg-shaped machine-like palace that runs on marble to an impressive mountain. Pillows to build forts. For children, this show must be nirvana in built form, a crystallization of dreams that they may never have known. For adults, however, "Fun House" might look more like a summer banter: a rehearsal, a retreading, and even a missed opportunity.

Home is the superstructure of" Fun House. "The show is subdivided into exhibition areas that correspond to parts of the house, each highlighting a different example of Snarkitecture work. , the "home" of the house is a reenactment of "Dig," the 2011 project of the company for the showcase of art and architecture in New York.For this show, Snarkitecture filled the space with EPS architectural foam, turning a void into a solid, then dug out with the help of simple tools. Just like with "The Beach", "Dig" of Snarkitecture has has been copied and pasted into "Fun House" (in a slightly smaller format). "Fun House" is a carnival tour through the many clever – and sometimes brilliant – ideas that Snarkitecture has brought to life over the past decade.

Vanity will of course be lost to children, who will not ask Ions on "Marble Run", a sculpture that Snarkitecture debuted at the Delano South Beach Hotel as part of Design Miami in 2015. A tower of serpentine chutes, it's a simple (but big) toy made in the all-white aesthetics of Snarkitecture's signature. The children lay black glass beads and watch them leave. Then, it's the next thing, whether it's war on couch cushions in the living room ("Pillow Fort", 2012) or wandering through a labyrinth of fabric bands hanging in the bedroom ("Light Cavern" , 2015). Maria Cristina Didero, independent curator based in Milan, is the architect of this meta-architectural showcase. "Fun House" is as much his show as that of Snarkitecture; Some of the most graceful touches of the show come in places where she organized the company's products. "Cast Light" (2011) and "Broken Ornament" (2012) – the two cast gypsum cement sculptures that appear in the kitchen "Fun House" – illuminate how the designers use trompe-l'oeil obstructions and fractures to rethink everyday things.

Snarkitecture looks like a start-up from Silicon Valley, a trio that likes to move fast and break things. For "Eames Chair" (2014), a Design Within Reach project, the company wrapped the iconic Eames lounge chair and footrest in heat-shrinkable plastic and put a torch on it. "Tilt Coaster" (2014) and "Slip Chair" (2017) are made just to be unusable. His work is design for an era that privileges experiences on things: all-white-all objects that represent a kind of negation of the object. Snarkitecture is the Marie Kondo of the world of architecture.

The problem with "Fun House" is that viewers of the Building Museum already know Snarkitecture. Visitors watched in depth the monochromatic vision of the company with "The Beach" three years ago. While the survey is as fun as the job – no small feat – what is it doing here?

Washington, DC, seems particularly rife with a category of art that one might call show. "Wonder", a series of installations from the Renwick Gallery – apparently the craft museum of the Smithsonian Institution – drew some 732,000 visitors to the museum eight months after it reopened in 2015. The Hirshhorn Museum and the sculpture garden have registered 1 million visitors in 2017 thanks to Infinity Mirrors its assembly of honey traps from Yayoi Kusama's charming (and socially shareable) mirror environments.

The second appearance of Snarkitecture at the museum in almost as many years raises the question: Does the Building Museum take architecture seriously? There are also programs in other cities that involve madness, namely the series of annual pavilions of the Serpentine Gallery in London. This year's edition is a dark structure designed by Frida Escobedo of Mexico. It would not work as well as a place to drop the kids for a few hours.

Run concurrently with "Fun House" is "Evicted", an exhibition based on Matthew Desmond's award-winning and obsessing look at the justice and housing crisis facing the most vulnerable families in the United States. It is difficult to imagine a more marked contrast in museum exhibitions, between entertainment and education. And of course, museums must do both. But the rush to the crowds has generated serious inflation in Washington and elsewhere, which is measurable in shows that are steadily increasing.

At the very least, there are many designers who deserve the platform. t do a service to viewers by returning to the well. It does not even do wonders for Snarkitecture, whose provocations seem like a safe bet this time around. The real risk may seem different. There is always next summer.