Aesthetic Environmentalism

The Museum of Modern Art has long been adept at identifying trends, movements, cultural inflection points, from the rise of the Bauhaus to the aesthetics of consumer objects to the emergence of prefabricated housing. Certainly this is in the DNA of the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design, which was founded almost a century ago by Philip Johnson, one of the most dexterous trend-appropriators ever. Now, with Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, the museum aims to contend with the most pressing challenge confronting the architectural profession today — the need to face up to the construction industry’s complicity in the ecological destruction of our planet and to formulate new practices to mitigate the ongoing damage. In the catalogue, the museum’s director, Glen Lowry, writes that “Emerging Ecologies continues a long tradition of exploring environmental issues” at the museum. Actually, that seems a stretch; with the notable exception of Rising Currents, the 2010 exhibition on sea-level rise around New York City, I can’t think of a MoMA show that dealt explicitly with environmental concerns. ¹

The Museum of Modern Art has long been adept at identifying trends, movements, cultural inflection points.

But times change; a few years ago the museum received a gift of $10 million from Emilio Ambasz — architect, industrial designer, and, from 1969 to 1976, a MoMA curator — to establish the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment. Organized by the institute’s director, Carson Chan, Emerging Ecologies is the first show produced by the new entity, and it seems to me at once laudable and frustrating, an ambitious but nonetheless problematic exhibition that struggles to establish, on the one hand, the relationship of architecture to the environmental movement, and, on the other, its relevance to our present-day crisis. Which is to say that the exhibition grapples with its very premise; and which is perhaps why it never offers any clear or consistent definitions of such basic terms as “ecological,” “environmental,” “sustainable,” or “green.”

In contemporary practice, slipperiness of terminology has enabled the cynical greenwashing of reprehensible projects, allowing architects to meet one set of criteria while eliding (or eluding) others. Today firms can claim, for instance, that a house has achieved “net zero” because it generates onsite the limited amount of energy it consumes; no matter that the house is located on a remote site accessible only by private jet. Likewise, an urban high-rise built conventionally of carbon-hungry concrete and steel can be commended as “green” if its facade is festooned with vines and trees. Precision of nomenclature aside — and perhaps it doesn’t matter — the curators have clearly employed stretchy criteria for inclusion. For which I am grateful; featuring more than 200 works and spanning six decades, the exhibition is historically capacious and fascinatingly diverse, with projects that range from deadly serious to goofy, from eerily prescient to thankfully dead-end. ²

Wright famously described his architecture as “organic,” by which he meant buildings rooted to a site and made from local materials. Yet Fallingwater was hardly kind to its local environment.

We are greeted at the start of the show by a large model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, from 1938 — a perennial crowd-pleaser. But positioning this icon of American architecture at the beginning is more than a little misleading. As the wall text (which is not easy to find; why couldn’t the exhibit designers put the key information right on the model pedestals?) forthrightly states, Wright “never identified as an environmentalist.” Indeed, in his lifetime the term did not even exist, at least not in its current meaning. Wright famously described his architecture as “organic,” by which he meant buildings that were rooted to a site and constructed with natural, local materials — and yet Fallingwater was hardly kind to its local environment in the woods of southwestern Pennsylvania. Just look at the (rarely photographed) back side of the model, and you realize that a massive quantity of rock was blasted out of the hillside to allow the weekend house to nestle into its site, and to divert the stream bed of the Bear Run. (And don’t ask where the sewage goes when you flush the toilet.) Fallingwater is a sublime work of art, but it strains the proposition of an architecture “in unity with nature.” Wright was the progenitor of what you might call an aesthetic environmentalism — if it looks natural, it must be virtuous — that characterizes much of the work in Emerging Ecologies.

On the wall adjacent to the Fallingwater model are photographs and drawings of a project from ten years later that points in a very different direction. The Dover Sun House, located in exurban Boston, is hardly “organic” in appearance; designed by architect Eleanor Raymond and biophysicist Mária Telkes, it is instead a proudly modernist house, clearly influenced by the Bauhaus émigrés Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, then teaching at the Harvard GSD and exerting a growing influence on U.S. housing design.

Unlike Wright’s design, this is genuinely energy-conscious architecture. On its south façade, it incorporates over-scaled glazing configured to be a solar scoop, capturing thermal energy during the day that was then stored in drums of Glauber salt and released to heat the interiors at night. The system worked, too, though technology would soon outpace salt-based heat recovery, and no homebuilders would replicate this prototype. But turn the Dover Sun House around 180 degrees and cover the broad shed roof with photovoltaic panels, and you have a project that anticipated the later rise of solar energy as a source of home heating — and, I might note, a residential form far likelier to appeal to the American public than R. Buckminster Fuller’s contemporaneous Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, also in the exhibition.

Fallingwater, the Dover Sun House, and the Dymaxion Dwelling Machine belong, in the show’s organizational framework, to the “Prehistory of Environmental Architecture.” From here we are led into “Enclosed Ecologies,” the next of five thematic sections. That architects design enclosures within which the environment can be controlled is of course obvious. As histories from Marc-Antoine Laugier’s The Primitive Hut to Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment have recounted, we humans are the only species that cannot survive without shelter from the weather and the climate. But what the curators want us to attend to are works that pursue extreme degrees of atmospheric control — projects that cultivate and enclose self-sustaining ecologies that effectively deny the presence of the unruly world beyond.

Several projects cultivate self-sustaining ecologies that effectively deny the presence of the unruly world beyond.

The main attraction of this section is Buckminster Fuller, the polymathic architect-inventor who, after creating the quirky Dymaxion House, achieved broad fame with his promotion of the geodesic dome. Invented in Germany after World War I, the form was popularized by Fuller, who inspired a generation of designers to adopt the thin-membrane structure for numerous programs ranging from botanical greenhouses to military radar stations to camping huts. In the exhibition we see one of the most celebrated of these structures: the Climatron, constructed in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1960, a vast spherical space within which multiple synthetic biomes were controlled by a pioneering computer system. As the curators write, in the catalogue, “In one visit, people could experience the forests of Brazil, Hawaii, India, and Indonesia — bounding across the planet without leaving the American Midwest.” ³ Not long afterward Fuller, in collaboration with the Japanese architect Shoji Sadao, exponentially one-upped the St. Louis project with an astonishing proposal for a two-mile-diameter Dome over Manhattan, here represented by a wall-sized blowup of their famous and terrifying photo montage. “Designed at the height of the Cold War to provide a regulated climate that would eliminate snow-removal costs,” write the curators, “the dome intimated that it could also provide shielding in the event of an apocalyptic, nuclear fallout.” ⁴

More bizarre — or visionary, if you prefer — are the projects that would have us abandon entirely an earth that we will have made uninhabitable — a prospect all too imaginable these days. Yet the sci-fi illustrations created in 1975 by a team of engineers from NASA and Stanford University, depicting a suburban housing tract floating in space within an enormous bubble, are simultaneously silly and appalling. ⁵ Alas, their proposition — that we might escape ecological disaster on earth by exporting to outer space the very building type that ruined the terrestrial environment — seems to have caught on with some of today’s tech billionaires.

Geodesic domes are ever-popular exhibition imagery, but Fuller’s bona fides as an environmentalist are legitimate; in fact he was obsessed with the optimization of materials and energy. When I was an architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania, Fuller came to lecture. I don’t remember much about his talk except that it was very long, but I’ll never forget his visit afterward to our studio, where he gave us a pop assignment — to analyze the project we had on our drawing boards and figure out how much it would weigh and the volume it would enclose. To reduce a building design to a ratio of cubic feet of space to pounds of materials was a radical idea, especially at Penn, which back then was very much under the spell of Louis Kahn and his elemental and massive masonry architecture.

Geodesic domes are ever-popular exhibition imagery, but Fuller’s bona fides as an environmentalist are legitimate.

The ubiquitous Fuller is prominent as well in the show’s section on “Environment as Information.” Here he is represented by his World Game, an educational project proposed for Expo 67 in Montreal that offered visual simulations of various data — commodity flows, natural resources, population statistics, etc. — and encouraged game participants to cooperatively develop planetary scenarios. The maps and diagrams from this project are remarkable, especially for an era of relatively primitive electronic computation. Computers are the protagonist in the story of CARLA — the acronym stands for Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis — a program developed by architect Beverly Willis in the early 1970s as a tool to navigate California’s newly enacted land-use regulations. Willis was inspired by the contemporaneous work of landscape architect and regional planner Ian McHarg, then in the early years of his enormously influential career as educator and environmentalist. McHarg’s approach to ecological research is highlighted in the gorgeous, hand-drawn maps created in 1968 by his students at the University of Pennsylvania, showing the Upper Estuary of the Delaware and color-coded to document various geological and ecological features. “In producing these massive drawings,” write the curators, “these students were pushed not only to their physical limits but to their conceptual limits as well: for the first time in their architectural educations, they were instructed to look beyond a small plot of land to apprehend an overall natural system as the site of their design.” ⁶

Things get peculiar, at times, in the section called “Life Forms,” which spotlights attempts by designers to collaborate or cohabitate with other species, or to emulate them. In 1980, for example, the U.S. architect-engineer Carolyn Dry created designs for aquatic structures that would be constructed by harnessing coral-generating organisms which, according to Dry, use “only the most common and abundant resources.” ⁷ Other projects in this section include the “Dolphin Embassy,” proposed in 1997 by the countercultural collaborative Ant Farm, which sought to create a “neutral playground” within which humans and dolphins could commune, and architect Eugene Tssui’s unbuilt biomimetic structures — a “City on the Sea” off the coast of Britain, and “Venturus,” a “wind-generated” house in British Columbia — which look like mutant insects and reptiles, more suited to the pages of Mad Magazine than Architectural Record.

The wall text at the entrance to Emerging Ecologies dates the birth of the environmental movement to the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, the deeply researched exposé of the ecological damage caused by pesticides, written by marine biologist Rachel Carson. (I would give soft credit also to Lady Bird Johnson, whose advocacy for landscape conservation led to the 1965 Highway Beautification Act and many parkland initiatives. And don’t forget Susie Spotless, whose 1964 public-service-announcement mantra “every litterbit hurts, so don’t be a litterbug” drummed entry-level enviro-awareness into the heads of American children.) In fact, environmentalism in the United States has always been more grounded in scientific and sociopolitical movements than in architecture; think about the annual Earth Day gatherings, the first of which, on April 22, 1970, took the form of a massive political protest.

Environmentalism in America is more grounded in scientific and sociopolitical movements than in architecture.

Hence the exhibition section titled “Critical Experiments” highlights initiatives that are more social than architectural. These include the off-grid hippie commune called the Ark, designed in 1976 by the Cape Cod-based New Alchemy Institute and constructed on Prince Edward Island with funding from the Canadian government; a distant descendant of the Dover Sun House, the Ark was described by the New Alchemists as “a bioshelter powered and heated by the wind and sun.” ⁸ (The Ark was briefly used as a residence, then as a research center, then as a restaurant; it was demolished in the late ’90s.) In a similar spirit, the choreographer Anna Halprin staged a series of Experiments in Environment Workshops from the mid ’60s to early ’70s; often held at Sea Ranch, the ecologically sensitive Pacific coast community designed by her husband, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, the events mixed dance, ritual, play, and free love, with the goal, in the curator’s words, of cultivating “collective creativity and new forms of environmental awareness.” ⁹

Also featured in this section are the successful 1981 protest march by members of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation against construction of the Orme Dam in Arizona, an infrastructural project that would have flooded much of their land, including a tribal cemetery; and the years-long demonstrations, starting in 1982, against a PCB-contaminated landfill in Warren County, North Carolina, which are widely credited with launching the environmental justice movement. These significant (but non-architectural) events are both represented by photos, printed matter, and ephemera, which make them a somewhat awkward fit within an ostensibly architectural exhibit. In this light it seems pertinent to note that these enviro-political histories are pretty much the only instances of specific Native and Black voices in the exhibition.

The most ecologically benign architecture involves not the construction of new buildings but rather the reuse of existing ones — an obvious truth, though perhaps a painful one for architects.

The politics of environmentalism, and, more pressingly, of climate crisis, inevitably hover all around the artifacts of the exhibition. Apropos the protest against the Orme Dam, the exhibit wall text states, “Viewing architecture through the lens of the environment demands that we expand its definition to include not just the construction, but also the deliberate obstruction of built forms that cause ecological harm.” Here the curators may really be onto something crucial: the importance of focusing not on what to build or how to build but on what not to build. Across all politics, the most ecologically benign architecture involves not the construction of new buildings but rather the preservation, renovation, and reuse of buildings that already exist. This is an obvious truth, though for architects it is perhaps also inconvenient and maybe even painful. (For tech bros too: you have perhaps seen the unwittingly dystopian renderings of a brand-new city that a group of Silicon Valley investors are proposing for 800 acres of California farmland northeast of San Francisco. ¹⁰) In their recent book Transform: Promising Places, Second Chances, and the Architecture of Transformational Change, Deborah Berke and Thomas de Monchaux exhort us to think beyond conventional and siloed conceptions of preservation and sustainable design and to understand them instead as components of a necessary paradigm shift to prioritizing reuse and adaptation. This point is made by some of the speakers in an audio-only postscript to the show called Next Ecologies, and it is disappointing that MoMA does not emphasize the theme more strongly. Perhaps it should be the topic of the Ambasz Institute’s next exhibition — but it’s probably not sexy enough for MoMA.

The final section of the exhibition, “Green Poetics,” circles us back to the beginning. Here we view a series of projects that, like Fallingwater, claim green credentials by virtue of their integration into the landscape. Some of these are very beautiful, and some take integration to the extreme: the Massachusetts-based architect Malcolm Wells, for instance, took an assertive ethical position by advocating that humans restore the precedence of nature by building only underground, and then designed a series of photogenic earth-sheltered houses, including one for himself, on Cape Cod. (The idea didn’t catch on, as the U.S. is not a nation of troglodytes.) The Italian architect Gaetano Pesce injected a spiritual component into underground architecture with his Church of Solitude, an unbuilt grotto for contemplation intended for a site in New York City, where it would encourage “quiet retreat from the densely packed, largely anonymous International Style skyscrapers of the above-ground world.” ¹¹

James Wines, of the environmental design firm SITE, took a cheeky approach when he invited a forest to invade a BEST Products showroom in Richmond, Virginia. The “Forest Building” was one of a series of retail projects SITE designed for BEST in the 1970s and ’80s; the buildings, with facades that appeared to be crumbling or ruined, were undoubtedly cute and clever, but hardly germane to a serious conversation about environmental or ecological architecture. Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates are included in the show’s “Enclosed Ecologies” section with their unbuilt design for the National Fisheries Center and Aquarium in Washington, D.C. But the firm would have been a welcome addition to “Green Poetics”: I am thinking of their 1968 Oakland Museum, the entire roof of which is a park — an earlier, more fully integrated, and more influential example of building-as-garden than the 1990 Prefectural International Hall in Fukuoka, Japan, by Emilio Ambasz, which is featured in the section.

“Green Poetics” is indeed dominated by Ambasz. Four of his projects are shown with photos, drawings, and large models, some commissioned for the show; the model for the Casa del Retiro Espiritual in Seville, Spain, a buried residence that sprouts an observation tower reminiscent of John Hejduk’s work, is especially exquisite. No doubt Ambasz’s architectural production has been green, usually of the cover-it-with-earth-and-plant-it genre; the publisher’s blurb for the 2022 monograph Emilio Ambasz: Curating a New Nature, by Barry Bergdoll, claims that the architect “has been famously labeled the ‘father, poet, and prophet’ of green architecture.” This may be true (though I was unaware); but in any case, concluding Emerging Ecologies with a section so heavily devoted to its funder taints the show, giving it more than the whiff of a vanity project.

The salvation of the planet will require political, social, and economic transformations far beyond the scope of architecture.

A few days after the opening of Emerging Ecologies, I was hit with a depressing reality when I read a news story about the unveiling of a design by Zaha Hadid Architects for a “supertall, crystalline skyscraper,” set on a mountaintop and facing an artificial lake, that will offer “the dreamlike experience of living in the clouds,” very near a planned ski resort in Trojena, Saudi Arabia. ¹² A supertall and a ski resort in a sparsely populated region of Saudi Arabia? At first I thought this was a spoof. But no: the Hadid firm’s project is part of the infamous Neom, the new megacity being planned by the Saudi government that has seduced an embarrassing number of designers with its multibillion-dollar budgets and prospects of pharaonic-scale construction. It’s a sorry reminder that some architects just don’t care. (What was it that Philip Johnson said about being a whore? ¹³)

The curators of Emerging Ecologies refer, at one point, to “environmentalism’s peak in the 1970s.” Every historical review needs a cutoff date, but this seems puzzling, to say the least. Are they ignoring the passionate activism of recent years, set off by the ever-unfolding climate crisis? It would seem more accurate to see the 1970s as the moment when the first wave of modern environmentalism began to crest — a period that might now appear quaint or naïve, reflecting a faith that through some combination of design and technology we can achieve an ever-elusive ecological harmony. Alas, the building and construction sector continues to be a major environmental culprit, accounting for some 40 percent of global CO2 emissions. The design profession must clean — and green — our own house, to be sure, but at this stage the salvation of the planet requires social, political, and economic transformations far beyond the scope of architecture.