Visionary or Woo-Woo?
For the most part, Emerging Ecologies occupies a mundane topography of composting toilets, upcycled materials, bioshelters, and geodesic domes.
Stanford torus interior view. 1975. from Space Settlements: A Design Study. Collection Don Davis
Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, curated by Carson Chan with Matthew Wagstaffe, Dewi Tan, and Eva Lavranou, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, until January 20, 2024.
The September afternoon I spent in the Museum of Modern Art’s new design survey passed by calmly enough. But as I made my way out of the museum, climate activists began streaming in. “MoMA drop KKR!” they shouted in reference to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the private equity firm founded by board chair Marie-Josée Kravis’s husband, Henry. The protesters were calling attention to KKR’s status as a majority stakeholder in Coastal GasLink, a natural gas pipeline project currently underway in British Columbia. Since 2019, Coastal GasLink has been cited for over fifty alleged environmental violations; equally egregious, the pipeline threatens to displace the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, whose members staunchly oppose the project, from its traditional lands.
Complicity, whether Kravis’s, MoMA’s, or the design industry’s, is not really a co…
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