Right around the corner from our offices is an incredibly ambitious exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd street between 5th and 6th avenues. The exhibit brings a fresh perspective of our current ecological crisis through the lens of the birth of the environmental movement. The focus is on the critical role that architecture played in the conceptualizing of solutions to problems that while serious at the time paled in comparison to the realities of today. The article is worth a read and if you are in the area, definitely worth a visit. We’ll meet you there.
FROM ARCHITECTURAL RECORD / BY PANSY SCHULMAN
Opened September 17, the latest architecture exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) tackles ecological concerns through a historical lens, looking back at the intersections of architecture with the environmental movement as it came to fruition in the 20th century.
Encompassing both built and unbuilt works from the 1930s through the 1990s, Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism delves into an array of architectural responses to the concerns of environmentalism, both bringing to light contributions of lesser-known practitioners while reexamining the portfolio of the era’s masters, such as Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright. To that egalitarian aim, the large-scale model of Wright’s instantly recognizable Fallingwater which greets visitors as they enter the exhibition abuts a 13-foot-long scroll produced during one of seminal feminist architect Phyllis Birkby’s "environmental fantasy" workshops for women in the 1970s.