The Museum of Modern Art New York has announced the opening of an exhibition focused on the first realized and unrealized projects that address ecological and environmental concerns. Featuring works by architects who practiced mainly in the United States from the 1930s through the 1990s, the exhibition titled “Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism” is on view from September 17, 2023, through January 20, 2024. The over 150 works showcased reveal the rise of the environmental movement through the lens of architectural practice and thought.
The fraught relationship between the natural and the built environment became an important theme beginning in the 1930s, with several architects such as Emilio Ambasz, Charles and Ray Eames, and Frank Lloyd Wright exploring this new interest through innovative, dystopian, and daring architectural projects. Many of these foreshadowed and anticipated the ecological effects of overpopulation, the depletion of natural resources, and the effects of pollution. The projects are arranged in five thematic groupings: Environment as Information; Environmental Enclosures; Multispecies Design; Counterculture Experiments; and Green Poetics.
During the beginning of environmentalism, architects played an important role in developing the metrics and analytical instruments to understand and monitor the environment, transforming it into an element that can be worked with through design. In 1967, R. Buckminster Fuller conceptualized the World Game, a computerized system designed to illustrate the flow of essential raw resources, such as cotton, gold, coal, and wood, to make environmental management more visible to a larger population. Early computer-generated printouts by Beverly Willis dating to 1971 are also exhibited in the “Environment as Information” segment, showcasing drainage maps, site geology and soil data derived from Willis's innovative Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis (CARLA).
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What Are Living Infrastructures?In the “Environmental Enclosures” section presents projects that attempted to create their own ecosystems. Among these early works lies a set of hand-painted illustrations by NASA titled "Space Settlements: A Design Study." This project, conceived in 1975, aimed to conserve Earth’s resources by envisioning a self-sustaining enclosed ecosystem in outer space. The project encompasses a diverse collection of studies, tracking diagrams, resource flow analyses, and evocative images.
The exhibition also highlights counter-cultural architectural experiments that strived to challenge the consumerist lifestyle of the United States. These included participatory projects where individuals could generate their own energy and food, and off-grid structures sustaining inhabitants in self-contained ecosystems. Ant Farm's Dolphin Embassy project expanded on this counterculture ethos, envisioning a multi-species society in 1975 inspired by advances in dolphin research.
Meanwhile, architects like James Wines and Emilio Ambasz explored the aesthetic dimensions of ecological architecture. Their projects blended natural forms with conventional design, offering innovative approaches that harmonized architecture and nature to create a meaningful ecological living experience.
The exhibition was organized by Carson Chan, Director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment and Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design, with Matthew Wagstaffe and Dewi Tan from the Ambasz Institute Research Assistants, and Eva Lavranou, 12-Month Intern at the Ambasz Institute.
Several other exhibitions opened this year also explored the interference between history and architecture. Presented at the Museum of Warsaw, the exhibition titled “Warsaw 1945-1949: Rising from Rubble” explored reconstruction and rebuilding efforts in the Polish capital following the destructions of the Second World War, offering clues into the potential reconstruction efforts to take place in Ukraine. Earlier this year, the Danish Architecture Center (DAC) announced the opening of the first permanent exhibition on Danish Architecture in Copenhagen, while Centre Pompidou in Paris debuted the largest retrospective of Norman Foster's work from the past six decades.
