What is environmental architecture? The premise is a paradox: could any building – with all of its related and knock-on effects of shipping, smelting, and welding metals; felling, sawing, and quartering lumber; and churning, pouring, and setting concrete – ever really be in tune with the natural environment?
In a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the proposition is radically rethought. What if instead of defining environmental architecture as a form of construction, it’s the opposite – the absence, or prevention of architecture? In ‘Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism’, curator Carson Chan draws together environmental movements and figures in the United States from the 1930s up until the 1970s, including authors and conservationists, and shows how the visionary work of hundreds of architects, educators, and campaigners seeking to conserve and protect the environment have formed a new definition of architecture itself.
The exhibition presents more than 150 objects, including maps, drawings, models, and photography from MoMA’s collections and beyond. Works and ideas by familiar names like Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller, Ant Farm, and James Wines are set in the context of activists and protectionists putting forward rewilding strategies, preventing dam construction, and advocating for new ways of considering the relationship to Modernism’s mass-produced and industrialized constructions.
The extensively researched exhibition sits within a lineage of seminal architectural shows that seek to draw attention not to a singular figure or built work, but to generate a counterproposal to the history of architecture, adding novel definitions, cultures, perspectives, and pivotal moments from the fringes of history right to the heart of New York in the 2020s.
This is your first exhibition at MoMA as inaugural director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment. What are the Ambasz Institute’s agenda and long-term goals?
The long-term agenda of the Institute is to change the way we define architecture. Traditionally, MoMA has played a big part in delineating architecture as buildings, but the way that I’m thinking about it, building is just a small part of what architecture can be. I would describe architecture as a process, rather than an object. Architecture includes looking at how resources are extracted, the labor conditions of that extraction, the social, political, economic, racial, and historical context of a site, and also the afterlife of a building. What happens to a building after we’re done with it? Do we reuse it? Do we take it to pieces for parts? Do we demolish it and put it in landfill? This shift in definition allows us to understand the impact architecture has on the world.
And why did you start with this exhibition? What does the show say about what we can expect from the Institute going forward?
If the goal of the Institute is to redefine how we think about architecture, the show aims to set the stage for how that happens. ‘Emerging Ecologies’ surveys how architecture as a field defined ‘environment’ in the 1960s and 1970s, during the rise of environmentalism in the United States. And we’re looking particularly at the US, because the modern environmental movement was an American phenomenon, starting with Rachel Carson’s era-defining book Silent Spring in 1962 and the creation of Earth Day in 1970. If we’re going to try to make changes to how we define architecture in the future, it makes sense to look at how we’ve tried to do it in the past. The exhibition features many architects who haven’t been put in the spotlight before, and also many that are already famous, but with works that we might not have looked at in the past.
Exhibition-making is a topic you’ve been both passionate and informed about throughout your career before MoMA, so I’m curious to know what exhibitions you’ve referenced and how you see this one as a continuity of that incredible history of landmark architecture shows at the museum.
There are so many moments in MoMA’s history that I’ve thought about for this exhibition. One is definitely the 1932 exhibition ‘Modern Architecture: International Exhibition’, whose curators coined the term International Style. Exhibitions like that have really pushed the idea that architecture is understood through building design – it was a powerful mouthpiece for this definition of Modern architecture at large. What I want to do with this exhibition is offer the contours of a new movement, Environmental architecture, which we can see as a countermovement or an anti-movement to Modern architecture. And so in a way, I see ‘Emerging Ecologies’ as a response to that exhibition.
How do you define environmental architecture?
Broadly speaking, Modern architecture is characterized by an interest in machine aesthetics, which has made it easily identifiable. Environmental architecture is almost the opposite. Environmental architecture is identified by its diversity, and what holds it together is that everyone sees the environment and ecology as important, as founding or fundamental to their practice. It’s important to recognize that environmental knowledge in the US didn’t just arrive in the 1960s, it has existed with Indigenous communities for centuries before these mid-20th-century architects started their experimentations.
A lot of the objects in the exhibition are organized by a larger idea that the architecture of ecologies is often about withholding or obstructing the built form. That’s fascinating as a thought experiment about the type of people and practices that could therefore be considered as architectural.
One thing we want to emphasize is that preventing a structure from being built is as architectural as building a structure. We’re exhibiting news documents from the Orme Dam protest. There was a plan in the mid-20th-century to build a dam just east of Phoenix, and this would have helped with water management there, prevented floods, and so on, but it would also have caused irreparable damage to two thirds of the Yavapai Nation’s land. They protested and eventually they got the project scrapped. And so we see preventing this dam as an incredible architectural gesture that could help us tell the story of Indigenous primacy on the land, Indigenous rights, and environmental justice, as well as architecture.
Which lessons from history could we learn from or apply today?
A really interesting example is from Oswald Mathias Ungers. In 1977, together with his teaching assistants – Rem Koolhaas, Hans Kollhoff, Arthur Ovaska, and Peter Riemann – Ungers brought a group of Cornell students to Berlin. The studio was creating an urban plan for Berlin as a suggestion to make to the government. They came up with the ‘Green Archipelago’. The parts of the city that people actually used would be tended to, and the areas that weren’t used would just be rewilded. This was a time when students presented radical ideas to governments. We should look at that kind of energy again. Why not? There are thinkers today – I have in mind Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese’s book, Half-Earth Socialism (2022) – that’s suggesting something similar to Ungers. Why not leave half of the planet to just rewild? Leave it alone, don’t touch it. That would help sink some carbon.
Beatrice Galilee is a New York-based curator and critic of contemporary architecture. She is the cofounder and executive director of The World Around and author of Radical Architecture of the Future (2021).
‘Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism’ runs at MoMA in New York, from September 17, 2023 to January 20, 2024.
Published on September 15, 2023.
Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Don Davis (American, born 1952), Stanford torus interior view, 1975. Acrylic on board, 17 × 22″ (43.1 × 55.9 cm). Commissioned by NASA for Richard D. Johnson and Charles Holbrow, eds., Space Settlements: A Design Study (Washington, DC: NASA Scientific and Technical Information Office, 1977). Illustration never used. Collection Don Davis. 2. Cambridge Seven Associates (American, est. 1962), Tsuruhama Rain Forest Pavilion, Osaka, Japan. Project. 1993–95. Section drawing showing the underground levels and the paths at the forest level. 1994–95. Marker and Prismacolor pencil on black-line diazo print, 20 × 30″ (50.8 × 76.2 cm). Collection Cambridge Seven Associates. 3. Unknown artist, The Climatron in winter–Shaw’s Garden–Saint Louis.”, c. 1960. Postcard. 4 × 8″ (10.2 × 20.3 cm). The Missouri Botanical Garden Archives.