“It is art, just like sci-fi and fantasy is literature” — George R.R. Martin on Meow Wolf

Everyone knows that most interstellar spacecraft visiting Earth prefer landing in New Mexico. UFO’s consistently enjoy the remote landscapes, fresh cuisine, and picturesque scenery of the Southwestern United States. In a recent visit I decided to search for stranded vessels. What I found was an entirely different type of otherness in the desert. But I didn’t look in the vast empty darkness of Roswell or the secure and mysterious Area 51. My search began and ended with Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return at 1352 Rufina Circle in Santa Fe.

Take a couple of turns behind a normative suburban roadway featuring a Chilis, La Quinta, and Taco Bell and you are faced with a large white warehouse with pink parking stripes and glowing neon signs. The lobby, which includes a ticketing office, gift shop, and bar, instills the same emotions as when you are waiting in a long line for an amusement park ride and you find the massive zig-zagging queue breaks down into intimate spaces with heightened levels of decoration. This feeling always means one thing — you are close to the front. Well, it’s somewhere between that and the lobby of a Laser Tag because you aren’t really going on a ride, per se. See, a ride has a beginning and an end, but House of Eternal Return only begins.

Once past the ticket booth you enter the artwork from a long and dark hallway — a sort of architectural palate cleanser. This darkness opens up to the manicured lawn, picket fence, and frontal facade of a cozy vernacular house. The whole artwork is indoors, mind you, but believe me the boundary between inside and outside is far from the greatest concern here. To enter the house one may stroll through the garden and enter on the side or go right in the front door. Once inside, things begin to go awry. One is transported to different worlds, constantly encountering material oppositions — what should be hard is soft, what should be inside a cabinet isn’t. 

This nonlinear story is a narrative condition which allows for multiple points of entry on behalf of a reader. 

There is an upside down school bus, a washing machine you can slide through, and a glowing wooly mammoth skeleton that doubles as a percussion set. It is dark and cavernous, so it is not so intentionally built to be photographed like some of the installation’s contemporaries. The house slowly breaks down to reveal a type of worldbuilding which creates a thoughtful theme park, giving rise to unparalleled urges to play, to pretend, and to imagine. Within me, a feeling of complete surrender to the here and now was stirred that I needed worse than I knew.

The whole thing feels like stepping into the physical version of an obscure and underrated book by Alistair Graham called Full Moon Soup. The 1991 book features the same section cut of the Hotel Splendide on each page, and as you turn, the events of a very strange night unfold through beautiful illustrations. (In the second edition, released in 2009, they experimented with captions but I strongly recommend the original version which contains only drawings) In any case, what translates is a devolving story of order into chaos without a linear end. This nonlinear story is a narrative condition which allows for multiple points of entry on behalf of a reader. That is what made Game of Thrones so powerful — and also so uncomfortable to wrap up. It is worth noting that the one constant which grounds both non-linear narratives of Full Moon Soup and House of Eternal Return is that they depend on architecture to frame, separate, contain, and occasionally break. Architecture is the main protagonist in both stories.

Much like the Museum of Ice Cream doubles as a museum and an aesthetic experience the House of Eternal Return doubles as an artwork and an immersive experience. It is a precedent for how to make space to better fit a pluralistic society. We now have a recipe for breaking linear expectations. But of course, as a museum experience, people are prepared and conditioned to enter such a space. They pay an entry fee in order to be taken to another world. My question is: How can architecture bring forth this type of affect in a setting where people are not prepared for it? Could we learn something from worldbuilding and pluralist artwork that we can take into a project for, say, a public building? What I experienced in Santa Fe, New Mexico wasn’t a visit from outer space, it was myself and all other patrons that were transported. House of Eternal Return isn’t a landing platform, but a launchpad.