MoMA

Posts tagged ‘Rising Currents’

November 1, 2010 | Rising Currents

Rising Currents: Looking Back and Next Steps

Posted by Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design

The Rising Currents exhibition at MoMA closed on October 11, and as we have worked on the de-installation of the show in the intervening weeks, I have had a chance to reflect on the exhibition and the project as a whole. As I’ve noted here previously, the workshop and exhibition were precedent-setting in many ways—for myself as a curator, for MoMA as an institution, and, in some ways, for the New York architecture and landscape design community. Read more

Rising Currents, Rising Standards: Graphic Design Takes Up the Challenge

Posted by Ingrid Chou, Assistant Director, Graphic Design

Rising Currents exhibition entrance.The exhibition's graphic design was made to appear similar to blueprints, the mode of graphic communication among architects and builders. Photo: Jason Mandella

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront is a unique exhibition for its subject matter, but also because of the process of putting together the exhibition. As graphic designers, it was heartwarming to have the full support of both the curator and the exhibition designer throughout the entire process. We were particularly gratified to be given the opportunity to take take our creativity beyond the title wall and into the individual displays—yeah! Read more

Rising Currents: Looking Back at Putting Process on Display

Posted by Lana Hum, Exhibition Designer/Production Manager, Department of Exhibition Design and Production

ARO team in the midst of installation. Photo: Ingrid Chou

As the first of five exhibitions in the Issues in Contemporary Architecture series, the unprecedented nature of Rising Currents presented a number of firsts, including some novel moments in MoMA’s exhibition-making process: the first time producing an exhibition without a checklist of objects well in advance of opening; the first time exhibition content and exhibition design developed so closely in tandem; and the first time our modest, minimalist model platform held the weight, intellectual and actual, of five whole teams of architects, planners, ecologists, and their well-intentioned installers. (We really put that poor thing to the test, but I think everyone is the better for it). Read more

Rising Currents: Transformation through Creative Collaboration

Posted by Daniel Teitelbaum, Program Analyst, US EPA Region 2, New York, NY

Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio's New Urban Ground transforms Lower Manhattan with an infrastructural ecology. Courtesy Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio

At one time, climate change could be thought of as a distant threat that could be diffused through prompt collective action. That time is past. Greenhouse gas emissions will not be reduced quickly enough to prevent significant changes to the composition of our atmosphere. Even as we hope for the best, we must prepare for the unpleasant eventualities that scientists expect will arise. Read more

Rising Currents Boat Tour: Understanding the Present and Imagining a Possible Future

Posted by Ben Prosky, Director of Special Events and External Affairs, GSAPP, Columbia University

Photo (and all subsequent photos) by Ben Prosky

“YES,” I replied, without delay, to the e-mail announcing MoMA and the AIA Center for Architecture’s last boat tour of the New York harbor in August. Having missed several tours earlier in the summer, I could not let this opportunity pass. Through Rising Currents, MoMA had not only invited architects and landscape designers into their galleries to present works responding to a real-world dilemma, but was now taking the public out of its galleries and into the areas examined as well. Read more

Poet Matthea Harvey’s Plans to Slow Rising Currents

Posted by Matthea Harvey, poet and author

Installation view of Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront (on view through October 11). Photo: Jason Mandella

Early this summer, I was asked by MoMA educator Laura Beiles to write a poem responding to the show Rising Currents for a Modern Poets reading that took place aboard the New York Water Taxi on June 29. When I first walked into the gallery space, I was struck by the measuring sticks painted on the walls, showing how much the water will rise in the next century.

Rising Currents: Promise of a Park

Posted by Adriaan Geuze, Principal and Founder, West 8 urban design & landscape architecture b.v.

West 8/Rogers Marvel Architects/Diller Scofidio + Renfro/Mathews Nielsen/Urban Design +

The Universal Magic of New York Harbor

The chosen place, Governors Island, as a granite island in the middle of New York Harbor, has an amazing context. This natural bay where the Hudson and East rivers meet and the moon drives the waters of the Atlantic through the Verrazano Narrows, causing the tides to swirl around the navel of the world, Manhattan, is without compare. Here is where generations came ashore to build America, fusing their collective cultures together to form a peerless metropolis. The water was the center. New York was built on the shores, so that its magnificent silhouette would be reflected by the waves. Tunnels and athletic bridges labor to connect all its boroughs. Like the Bosporus and the Bay at Rio de Janeiro, New York Harbor has a seemingly universal magic. God created a place, which every civilization would choose for its own. Every morning, Manhattan is born again out of briny fogs. With Ellis Island and Liberty Island, Governors Island has been elected to share this bay. Together they have witnessed an intense history, or have themselves become the symbols of it. Read more

Rising Currents: The Impact of “Glocal”

Posted by Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, Associate Director, the Rockefeller Foundation

Tidal flooding at the edge of shops and homes in Can Tho, Vietnam (one of the Rockefeller Foundation ACCCRN cities). Photo courtesy Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio

At the opening of the Rising Currents exhibition at MoMA, curator Barry Bergdoll used the word “glocal” to describe the impact of this exhibition. At first I thought I misheard, but then I realized he meant that the exhibition was part of the growing global grassroots movement to address the impact of climate change with smart, local solutions. Read more

Rising Currents: Installation Underway!

Posted by Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design

We started the installation of the teams’ wall materials and models in the gallery yesterday, with ARO’s team beginning the assembly of their model. We liked the correlation of the unpacking of “Lower Manhattan” from the Manhattan Mini-Storage boxes! Each of the five teams are coming to do on-site installations this week. We’re looking forward to the public opening of the Rising Currents exhibition on March 24.

Rising Currents: Public Space Redefined

Posted by Adrian Benepe, Commissioner, New York City Department of Parks & Recreation

This morning I got on the Staten Island ferry to tour parks on the island with Parks Department officials and the leadership of a major environmental foundation. For several of them, it was the first trip to Staten island where they actually got off the ferry and went onto the island. Along the way, we talked about the harbor and the upcoming Rising Currents exhibition at MoMA.

I was fortunate to be able to attend the final weekend of open studio at P.S.1, where the five teams shared the ongoing process of their work, and I joined a few other city officials, including City Planning Chair Amanda Burden and Leslie Koch, who is directing the development of Governors Island. The whole place was wonderfully crowded, and the final session where each team gave presentations was held in a room crammed to the gills with people, including many sitting or lying on the floor.

From the Parks point of view, the proposals represent some innovative ways to create new realms of public space, places that are not traditional parks, but rather are flexible zones of water and land and plants and animals. We currently tend to look at parks as distinct from other urban forms, with fences, walls, planted buffers— different vocabularies of building materials. While each team has proposed concepts very different from the others, they all redefine the interaction of streets, parks, seawalls, canals, piers, and even the harbor itself. From a purely selfish point of view, many of the proposals offer a major expansion of flexible green space. Read more