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 concern of Emerging Ecologies. Instead, the exhibition—the first to be mounted by MoMA’s Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment—is eager to cast architects in their familiar role as white knight solutioneers. Slightly bland and politically benign, it focuses on the architectural experiments of the tumultuous 1960s and ’70s, when anxieties about looming food shortages, resource depletion, and population “bombs” collided with the techno-utopian, “small is beautiful,” DIY aesthetic of the US counterculture. The result was “environmental architecture”: an eclectic set of buildings and proposals that reflected a peculiar mix of profound dread about the state of the world and optimism that humanity could develop the tools to fix it. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” the slogan went.
We never did get very good at it. The most compelling passages of Emerging Ecologies narrow this frame, foregrounding a handful of creative individuals who sought to address specific conditions of urban life. Glen Small, eccentric cofounder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, responded to the state’s inflation-induced affordable housing shortage of the late 1970s with a plan for a multilevel, open-frame pyramid in Venice Beach, into which Airstream trailers, rather than conventional apartments, could be slotted. While conceived at least in part as a celebration of the eccentric charms of motor home living, Green Machine (1978) also promised its low-income residents self-sufficiency in the form of solar power, community vegetable gardens, and a shared equity ownership model that allowed tenants to take their Airstreams with them when they moved away. As quixotic as Small’s scheme sounds, the City of Los Angeles very nearly realized it. With the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act earlier in the decade, developers and their architects had to adapt to a new regulatory environment. Nowhere was this felt more acutely than in California, whose Environmental Quality Act compelled designers to assimilate metrics such as “environmental impacts” and “mitigation measures” into their practices. The exhibition features the Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis (CARLA) program, initiated by a young Beverly Willis as a way to consolidate (“flow”) disparate datasets from topography maps and drainage patterns to architectural drawings and budgetary projections. Willis, who died earlier this year at age ninety-five, piloted CARLA’s use with her master plan for the Crestview Hayward Townhouses (1973), a 120-unit hillside development that aimed to preserve the site’s natural features as much as possible.
If Willis emphasized the “physiography” of place, then Oswald Mathias Ungers, with his Green Archipelago (1977), was preoccupied with its physiognomy. Working hand in hand with his architecture students at Cornell and TAs Rem Koolhaas and Hans Kollhoff, Ungers applied insights from his studies of Rust Belt “ghost towns” to West Berlin, whose population was declining in the postwar period. Rather than incite the shrinking city to grow, the group proposed to accelerate its contraction by prescribing strategies of degrowth until it resembled a federation of small towns spaced apart by parks, gardens, and farmland. This posture of self-effacement was similarly proselytized by the architect Malcolm Wells in the decade prior. Faced with the bleak suburban sprawl of South Jersey (“asphalt and plastic, shopping malls as far as the eye can see”), Wells renounced disciplinary mores and refused to build on top of the landscape; from 1964 onward, he elaborated a system of subterranean dwellings, offices, even cities all but invisible to commuters hurtling down the turnpike.
Writing the politics of refusal into the history of environmental architecture is a prudent addition to an otherwise lily-white canon. But acknowledgement of Black and indigenous resistance movements of the past rarely translates into mea culpas in the present.
But for these examples, much of Emerging Ecologies occupies the more mundane topography of composting toilets, upcycled materials, bioshelters and geodesic domes, off-the-grid living, and a more synergistic relationship to the natural world. In other words, hippie shit. Here, designers were concerned less with remedying specific social or urban ills than with remediating humanity’s relationship with nature itself. Society had gone astray, seduced by a culture of mass consumption and a false sense of ecological plenitude made possible by the postwar proliferation of industrial pesticides and other toxic petrochemicals. For the hippies, the only solution was to start fresh from the ground up, via experiments in alternative ways of living. In these cases, more often than not, environmental architecture veered into the domain of elite self-indulgence. At the New Alchemy Institute, a five-acre, off-the-grid farm on Cape Cod, John and Nancy Todd preached a gospel of smug self-sufficiency. “You’re not detached from what’s going on in the world, and yet I don’t have the feeling that I’m required to change the world,” Bill McLarney, the project’s lead scientist, can be overheard explaining in a documentary about the project, as the camera cuts to brawny, shirtless men tinkering with a windmill crafted from salvaged carburetors and steel drums. In a 1976 New York Times Magazine cover story featured in the exhibition, a dozen barefoot New Alchemy denizens gather around a giant “solar pond” tank, part of the institute’s in-house fish farming operation. (Like many practitioners of this genre of environmental architecture, the New Alchemists were savvy self-promoters, skilled in cultivating fawning media coverage.) Around the same time, in Taos, New Mexico, Michael Reynolds was busy building houses from garbage. In the days before recycling programs, when trash was seemingly everywhere, he experimented with repurposing discarded beverage cans as an “indigenous” building material and even managed to attract the interest of a Federal Housing Administration on the lookout for affordable housing solutions. A formal partnership evidently never materialized, however, and Reynolds’s prototypes soon morphed into his signature Earthships, recumbent desert homes touting upcycled materials and passive heating and cooling systems. Today, with some of the larger models fetching $1 million on the real estate market, Earthships have become trophy homes for affluent preppers and in-the-know Alphabet execs.
For a show that aspires to be “a resource for those interested in tracing a new path for architecture that puts ecological and environmental concerns before all other considerations,” as Ambasz Institute director and curator Carson Chan puts it in the catalog, the ethics on display are often ambiguous at best. In the mid-1960s, American brain scientist and LSD enthusiast John Lilly descended on St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. There, he and Margaret Howe, a bright-eyed twenty-four-year-old in search of adventure, retrofitted and partially flooded a waterfront villa to accommodate a small pod of dolphins. With Lilly’s blessing, Howe eventually took up residence—with sleeping quarters in the form of an improvised bed poised on the edge of a pool—in a harebrained attempt to teach the dolphins to speak English. The whole affair is pitched to museumgoers as a “memorable lesson in multispecies habitat design,” and the black-and-white photographs of a young Howe lazily talking on the phone or writing in a notepad with a dolphin underfoot are indeed outrageous, but if you’re wondering what happened after this WFH experiment ended, you’ll have to google it. (At least one of the dolphins committed suicide.) Nearby, in a section dedicated to renderings of space colonies, Roy Scarfo’s 1965 painting Hollow Asteroid imagines a space-age pastoral within a hollowed-out asteroid. That the piece doubles as a depiction of a racial utopia—typical for the genre, as scholars have pointed out—goes unacknowledged in the show (though the catalog gently gestures at the settler-colonial undertones of the imagery). And the inclusion of works by Ambasz himself is suspect in its own right. A scale model of his 1998 proposal to encase the headquarters of Eni, the Italian oil and gas company, with live trees is witty and even slightly ahead of its time, but whether the inclusion of three additional “green over gray” buildings by him—the Casa de Retiro Espiritual in Seville, the Lucile Halsell Conservatory in San Antonio, and the Prefectural International Hall in Fukuoka—was warranted is debatable and inextricable from the fact of his $10 million patronage.
The only mildly provocative curatorial move is the nod to environmental justice. In 1979, Black residents of Warren County, North Carolina, organized against a proposal to site a PCB waste dump in the community. The resulting acts of civil disobedience—documented in the show with handwritten flyers, newspaper clippings, photographs, and other ephemera—and the attention the campaign drew to the disproportionate number of garbage dumps in Black neighborhoods are widely considered landmark events in the history of the environmental justice movement. A few years later, the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation’s decades-long fight against an Arizona dam that threatened to effectively submerge two-thirds of the nation’s reservation under water ended when the state finally capitulated. “Architecture,” as Chan ventures in his catalog essay, “can also be produced through the obstruction, withholding, or subtraction of built form,” and writing the politics of refusal into the history of environmental architecture is a prudent addition to an otherwise lily-white canon. But acknowledgement of Black and indigenous resistance movements of the past rarely translates into mea culpas in the present. In the case of the KKR-backed pipeline project, nineteen Wet’suwet’en land defenders have been criminally charged for participating in strategic blockades of the construction site to date. As for last September’s climate protesters and their demand that MoMA director Glenn Lowry meet with Wet’suwet’en leaders? The museum had them arrested.