Confronting Carbon Form, curated by Elisa Iturbe, Stanley Cho, and Alican Taylan, was on view at the Cooper Union from March 21 to April 16.
Material Reform: Building for a Post-Carbon Future by Material Cultures with Amica Dall. Mack Books, 144 pp., $22.
For those longing to know why we’re in this mess called the climate crisis, there’s no shortage of places to look. In the United States alone, the causes branch out in all directions: blame the Federal Highway Act or the Army Corps of Engineers, FHA loans or the Fordist wage, coal miners or Ronald Reagan, the open road or “petro-masculinity,” political liberalism or flat-pack shipping, or federal subsidies that impel all manner of material and energetic waste and suburban sprawl.
To this litany we might add modern architecture. Confronting Carbon Form, a recent exhibition at the Cooper Union, argued that the formal lexicon of modern architecture is also the vocabulary of the carbon-reliant world. The show—slick, cerebral, and at times obtuse—consisted primarily of highly abstracte…