You are Being Watched
By removing the barrier between the interior of the home and the exterior of the home, Matta-Clark at once forces those inside the house to face the disparity between their comfortable inside and the uncomfortable outside, building their appreciation for the architecture of the suburban home, and also forces those outside to see the comfort of inside and make them envy the home with its softer styles.
As the house in "Conical Intersect (1975)" was an 18th century Parisian home slated to be destroyed in favor of a more modern city square, this message is even more poignant: that new buildings come at the cost of old buildings and that progress for the sake of progress sometimes erases history. As a result, this exhibition is seen as one of Matta-Clark's greatest works, encapsulating the conflict between architecture and the people that must live in the architecture.
This, like much of Anarchitecture, is adapted from the style of Roberto Matta, and also Chile in general. "Les Roses sont Belles (1951)" was a Matta painting depicting the invasion of government surveillance into the home, and depicts a dollhouse remarkably similar to "Splitting (1974)." The title, The Roses are Beautiful, is a reference to the public indifference, how the average person is distracted from this invasion by other pretty things, like public works projects, that are meant to portray the government in a good light and excuse its transgression. In real life, this image of the open home was revived in Chile due to the 1973 coup d'état and the heavily increased authoritarianism that came with the Pinochet presidency. While the actual message of surveillance was secondary in Matta-Clark's architecture, he incorporated the image of the open home in many works and reinterpreted it into an American context.