MoMA (NY) announces: Emerging ecologies in September 2023, curated by the Emilio Ambasz Institute

The Museum of Modern Art announces Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, the first museum review of works (150) that examines the relationship between architecture and the environmental movement in the United States.

Open from September 17, 2023 to January 20, 2024, Emerging Ecologies is also the first exhibition created by the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment, born within the MoMA in 2020 thanks to an important and generous donation from the Legacy Emilio Ambasz Foundation (LEAF).

The aim of the Ambasz Institute – in the vision of its patron – is to promote a reconciliation between architecture and nature and the understanding of their interaction, to stimulate and enrich the global debate on the urgent need for ecological recalibration. The Institute is located within the Department of Architecture and Design in the Midtown Manhattan complex.

Emerging Ecologies is an exhibition of over 150 architectural works, realized and unrealized, which have anticipated, inspired, challenged, developed environmental and ecological issues in the United States from the thirties to the nineties of the twentieth century.

Models, photographs, diagrams, sketches, and other archival materials including posters, flyers, videos, and articles present innovative, daring, even dystopian projects that have sometimes prefigured and inspired the rise of environmental awareness, anticipating themes such as pollution, the depletion of natural resources, the protection of biodiversity. Projects, again, that have denounced, investigated, and tried to resolve the relationship between the built environment and nature.

The exhibition, a one-of-a-kind retrospective of six decades of projects, looks to the past to suggest solutions for the future.

The wide range of works collects interventions that celebrate the pioneers of environmental sustainability, including Frank Lloyd Wright, James Wines, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Beverly Willis and Emilio Ambasz himself  who, in an ad hoc recording  for Emerging Ecologies, together with other contemporary intellectuals and architects – Mae-ling Lokko, Jeanne Gang, Meredith Gaglio, Charlotte MalterreBarthes, Amy Chester,  Carolyn Dry -, shares a series of thoughts on the relationship between man and nature, helping to consider how the works on display can facilitate to understand the role of architecture in mitigating climate change.

Not surprisingly, at the announcement of the birth of the Ambasz Institute in 2020, Glenn D. Lowry, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, expressed his “immense gratitude” to Emilio Ambasz, recognizing him as “a precursor in the field of green architecture, for years at the forefront of issues related to architecture and ecology“. As Martino Stierli, chief curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of

Modern Art, said he was “delighted that, with the new Ambasz Institute, MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design would be in a unique position to create debate and promote the necessary change in the field of design for a fairer and greener future […] given that  ecology and the ongoing climate crisis are the most urgent challenges of our time, not only for architecture, but for humanity as a whole.”

You can check out more of Emilio Ambasz’ projects at his new Emilio Ambasz Virtual Museum website.