MoMA’s Ambasz Institute presents a series of self-authored and commissioned articles that explore how the built and natural environment intersect with topics like the climate crisis, resource extraction, environmental justice, and race and indigeneity.
Essays by the Ambasz Institute
“What Frank Lloyd Wright Got Wrong About the Country” by Matthew Wagstaffe
In 1920, for the first time in the history of the United States, the majority of the country’s population lived in cities. For architect Frank Lloyd Wright, this was not something to be celebrated. Surveying the contemporary metropolis, Wright saw little that met his approval: Its traffic-filled streets were “congested” and “intolerable,” and the “pretended means of relief” for this overcrowding—the skyscraper—only compounded the problem, bringing even more people into the city. Moreover, these skyscrapers, he contended, were “utterly barbaric,” with no “consideration for [their] environment.”
Read more on MoMA magazine.
“Seeing More Artworks with an Environmental Eye ” by Matthew Wagstaffe
Plenty of art in MoMA’s collection directly addresses the changing environment, pollution, and sustainability, whether through a documentary, utopian, or dystopian lens. But what happens when we revisit familiar favorites or unusual design objects that aren’t directly about the environment, and discover new ways of thinking about their materials, their fields of color, and their relationship to the planet? (Even the shimmering effect of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies has recently been linked to pollution in France. For our ongoing series for Earth Month, Matthew Wagstaffe, research assistant in the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint study of the Built and the Natural Environment, has written five ecologically minded wall labels for art in our galleries—a challenge for us all to continue to see our world anew.
Read more on MoMA Magazine.
“Meditations in an Emergency: The Voices of Emerging Ecologies” by Eva Lavranou
The exhibition Emerging Ecologies explores how architects responded to the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s and ‘70s. For many of these designers, safeguarding the natural world became the central concern of their practice. While not all of their proposed solutions are applicable to today’s world—the majority of the works in the show, after all, were created before there was a widespread public understanding of climate change—the ambition of these architects and their spirit of experimentation have much to teach us as we confront our own environmental emergency. As Jeanne Gang says, “Placing a building on our earth, it’s a big responsibility”
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“Emerging Ecologies: Introduction to a Field Guide” by Carson Chan
In their 1971 book Shape of Community: Realization of Human Potential—published a year after US Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act and the Nixon administration established the Environmental Protection Agency—the architects Serge Chermayeff and Alexander Tzonis presented the history of the world as a series of evolving “ecologies.” The authors argued that if the “first ecology” was that of the oceans—the place of life’s origin—and the “second ecology” was life on land, the “third ecology” began with the recognition that humanity now had the ability to alter the planet: that “the man-made and the natural are now inseparable.”
Read more on MoMA Magazine.
“Seeing Artworks with an Environmental Eye” by Carson Chan
Plenty of art in MoMA’s collection directly addresses the changing environment, pollution, and sustainability, whether through a documentary, utopian, or dystopian lens. But what happens when we revisit familiar favorites or unusual design objects that aren’t directly about the environment, and discover new ways of thinking about their materials, their fields of color, and their relationship to the planet? (Even the shimmering effect of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies has recently been linked to pollution in France. For this Earth Month, Carson Chan, curator in the department of Architecture and Design and director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint study of the Built and the Natural Environment, has written five ecologically minded wall labels for art in our galleries—a challenge for us all to continue to see our world anew.
Read more on MoMA Magazine.
“Architecture Must Adapt to a Changing World” A Conversation with Kunlé Adeyemi
How can studying the direction of the sun, different materials around the world, and communities that have built on water for centuries point to the future of architecture? MoMA’s Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment will host its first annual Earth Day lecture online, on April 20 at 5:00 p.m. The inaugural keynote speaker, architect and professor Kunlé Adeyemi, will address the increasing challenges of living on a damaged planet and the momentous cultural shifts required by the climate crisis. In advance of that conversation, Ambasz Institute director Carson Chan asked Adeyemi about his own innovations in design, which acknowledge and address the world’s changing climate, architecture’s role in both exacerbating and seeking solutions to rising environmental challenges, and how we can think about a sustainable path forward for communities around the world.
Read more on MoMA Magazine.
Commissioned Articles
“Does Capitalism Dream of Electric Jeeps?” A Conversation with Thea Riofrancos
Frank Lloyd Wright’s spectacular Broadacre City model—an arcadian fantasy of America transformed into a sprawling suburban network of family farms, first proposed in 1932—was only conceivable thanks to the growing availability of automobiles. Today we know the environmental consequences of gasoline-powered cars, and the rise of electric vehicles once again places the relationship between mobility, American culture, and the natural world at the center of conversations about design. Given the relentless pace of climate change, there is an urgent need to redesign our mobility infrastructure, shifting from a fossil fuel-dependent system to an electrified one. Recently, we spoke about these issues with Thea Riofrancos, associate professor of political science at Providence College in Rhode Island, an expert on resource extraction and the renewable energy transition.
Read more on MoMA Magazine.
“The War on Carbon” by Leah Aronowsky
These days, carbon dioxide has a bad rap. Everywhere you turn, it seems someone wants to sell you on their plan to eradicate this pest of a greenhouse gas—reduce it, reuse it, sequester it, suck it out of the atmosphere, store it deep underground, or net-zero it out. To date, architecture’s strategy for waging war on CO₂ has been to focus on energy efficiency. By developing technologies and construction techniques for making buildings that consume ever less energy, the logic goes, we can design our way to carbon neutrality.
Read more on MoMA Magazine.
“Simulated Worlds and Rotating Spacecraft” by Émile P. Torres
The difficulty of prediction hasn’t dissuaded some futurists from making bold claims about what things could—and should—look like thousands, millions, and even billions of years from now. Noted philosopher and historian Émile P. Torres considers humanity’s obsession with futurism, our many flops at predicting future technologies, and the rise of “longtermism.”
Read more on MoMA Magazine.
Built Ecologies on MoMA Magazine
“Green over Gray: Emilio Ambasz’s Architecture in the Landscape” by Dewi Tan
For our final episode of the Built Ecologies series, we turn to “green” architect Emilio Ambasz. Renowned for buildings that incorporate and frame luscious greenery, Ambasz here explores his lifelong commitment to creating architecture that harmoniously blends with nature and its surroundings. Rather than imposing the structure on the landscape, or seeing nature as an enemy, the “landscape frames the house”—it is impossible to disentangle one from the other.
Read more on MoMA Magazine.
“Place Is My Medium: Mary Miss Finds Art Under Ground” by Dewi Tan
Known for her interdisciplinary work between sculpture, architecture, and landscape design, Mary Miss has been a longtime advocate for how art can play a role in addressing contemporary social issues that affect our environment. In the latest episode of our Built Ecologies series, Miss tells us that “place is [her] medium;” she sees art as key in helping understand the world around us.
Read more on MoMA Magazine.
“Peter Chermayeff’s ‘Dark Magic Box’” by Dewi Tan
Peter Chermayeff often gets asked about the origin story of his architectural practice: how did he start designing aquariums? Spending childhood summers in Cape Cod, he cultivated a love for nature while playing with minnows in Slough Pond, but he didn’t foresee a lifelong career designing aquariums.
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“Reclaiming Indigenous Architecture in Hawaii” by Dewi Tan
For an unassuming tourist, Hawaiʻi often perceived as an untouched oasis of luscious green, blue beaches, and picturesque volcanoes. But in highly urbanized areas, like the popular Waikiki neighborhood in Honolulu, the landscape has been altered by high-rise condominiums and boardwalks lined with shops and restaurants. In fact, the islands, which served as natural fortresses in the Pacific during the Second World War, have invariably been shaped by the strong presence of the US military since decades before the war.
Read more on MoMA Magazine.
“Designing for Other Species” by Dewi Tan
For most architects, a space is usually designed with humans in mind. But as much as people have dominated the world, we also have to think about other species that play an essential role in our ecosystem. According to Joyce Hwang, architect and associate professor at the University of Buffalo, animals are all around us; it is a “default condition” of our world, making it imperative that we include them in the way we design our built environment.
Read more on MoMA Magazine.
“Building with Nature” by Dewi Tan
Today marks the launch of Built Ecologies: Architecture and Environment, a video series from MoMA’s Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment that features prominent architects and thinkers doing innovative work across environmental topics. In each episode, these figures are invited to define the terms “architecture” and “environment,” producing a through-line between videos that otherwise capture a variety of practices and backgrounds.
Read more on MoMA Magazine.