The Evolution of the American Dream, from Colonial Times to Today

The new House & Home exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., has been in the works for so long that one of the stories the curators first intended to tell – that of a housing “boomburg” in the suburban Las Vegas desert – has, by the exhibit’s opening this weekend, turned into something quite different. Today, Summerlin, Nevada, has one of the highest rates of foreclosure in the country, making it more a cautionary tale of how our physical houses can prompt financial ruin as much as they can embody gauzier dreams of home, family and community.

But this is all part of the much larger, messier story, anyway. House & Home, the most ambitious exhibit the museum has ever staged, is aiming to cover it all: the construction of American homes, their high art in architecture, the objects we put inside them, the associations they carry for us – and how all of this has evolved over time with new technology, changing politics and population shifts in and around the country. The curators, who have been working on all this since before our housing-related recession, have pulled in mention of everything from the balloon frame to the Homestead Act to models of cooperative living.