Emerging Ecologies Exhibition, MoMA

The climate talks at COP28 concluded this morning with a deal to “transition away from fossil fuels”, not phase them out. I have already expressed my distrust in the leadership of the summit, but I also have acknowledged that thousands of people with the best intentions were there. Headlines can sometimes be distracting, so before expressing an opinion, I plan to dig deeper, read the proceedings and reports from people who were there once the dust settles.

Now I want to share my impressions of an exhibition at the MoMA called Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism. As the curators state it, this is “the first major museum exhibition to survey the relationship between architecture and the environmental movement in the United States.” It is a carefully curated exhibition that is accompanied by an informative book.

I perceived the exhibition to have been broken down into three major categories of work: data collection, work that embraces nature and has an urge to connect with it, and work that seeks to dominate over the natural environment and tightly control it.

View of the entrance to the exhibition

As a response to the California Environmental Quality Act, in 1970 architect Beverly Willis integrated computational land analysis techniques into her professional practice in an attempt to create protocols that architects and planners would follow to ensure compliance. Her firm developed CARLA, Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis, a program that enabled public and private developments to use data and introduce what we now call parametric design into their decision-making process. This resulted in projects reducing their infrastructure costs by sometimes up to 35% just by optimizing the masterplan through an iterative process that was assisted and enabled by the computer.

In 1968, landscape Architect Lawrence Halprin with the help of cultural geographer Richard Reynolds devised The Sea Ranch Ecoscore, a helical graph tracing the interactions between human culture and the natural environment for a specific area, making a point that, as stated in the exhibition catalogue, “via the gathering and application of environmental knowledge, one can devise a design that makes possible the return to the harmonious rhythms of the past.” He and his wife Anna Halprin then created summer workshops with the task of bringing young designers together to cultivate environmental awareness.

I would add the work of Aladar and Victor Olgyay in the category of understanding the environment as we see them creating the comfort zone diagram in 1963, a different version of the psychrometric diagram that was developed earlier to identify the comfort zone within buildings and is still being used today. This was a vital tool to define what human comfort is, with of course whatever biases there were in the 1960's, so then we can find ways to achieve it. Among pioneers of Passive building was the New Alchemy Institute that was founded in 1969 in Cape Cod, which among others built a building on Prince Edward Island in Canada that efficiently captured the sun's energy and evenly distributed it into the house.

One of the most interesting projects that I saw, which was featured on the cover of Popular Science in 1949, was Maria Telkes' and Eleanor Raymond's Dover Sun House. It later proved to be a technological failure, but the groundbreaking concept was that through a large south-facing glazed facade the entire house would be able to heat itself through the power of the sun and its energy storage in large tanks of Glauber salt that has the unique property to absorb energy and release it as heat at the convenient temperature of 32°C or 90°F.

Buckminster Fuller, meanwhile, who was a strong believer in the power of technology, gave us ideas that sought to have greater control over the built environment. Right after WWII he proposed the Dymaxion Living Machine as a response to America’s housing shortage. The Dymaxion was a prefabricated aluminum structure that would reduce energy use mainly because of its form. He is mostly known for patenting the geodesic dome, an earlier invention of Walther Bauersfeld. Geodesic domes have since been built in many places around the world as they achieve impeccable structural capabilities with minimal material use, and perhaps the boldest proposal came in 1960: it was to cover midtown Manhattan with such a dome, because, as Fuller put it, that "would reduce the amount of energy required to heat and cool that area eighty-four fold."

Dome Over Manhattan, Buckminster Fuller & Shoji Sadao 1960

On the end of total climate control would be Paolo Soleri's Cosanti Foundation from the 1960's and the Arcologies concept as well as NASA's program from 1975 led by Gerard O'Neill that studied creating colonies orbiting Earth that could sustain human life in an earthlike environment. I was first made aware of Arcologies by playing the popular SimCity game as a teenager where the ultimate goal of a successful city would be to build such a building. Arcologies are technologically advanced, highly populous vertical cities that according to Soleri would put an end to the "pollution and unnecessary depletion of resources" that came with urban sprawl. Contrasting Soleri, NASA's program modeled the space colonies after Californian suburbia raising the question of who the beneficiaries of these luxurious space colonies would be. This was very well represented in the 2013 film Elysium with images of the space colony that are almost identical to the NASA drawings.

Torus sphere Interior view. Space Colonization. Artist: Don Davis ref: NASA SP-413; Space Settlements: A Design Study and photo from 2013 movie Elysium.

I saw this exhibit as a retrospective, which tool the visitor through the chronology of the movement of environmentalism and the study of the relationship of the built to the natural environment. I wondered why there was no reference to where we are now, but a depiction of the current state of environmentalism as it relates to architecture would be a whole exhibit on its own, and it is perhaps useful to let the visitor ponder this history, with its many inherent what-ifs, in the context of today’s climate crisis. I was introduced to and became passionate about environmental design during my second year of architecture school almost 25 years ago. What attracted me to it then can be summarized in this exhibition at the MoMA. To my mind, the most fascinating parts of an architect’s job are the gathering of data, and the rationalizing and manifesting of the relevant data in the design, in a way that is responsive to and harmonious with the surrounding environment, while remaining obedient to the needs of those who will use the structure.

Seeing this from the eye of a practicing architect and moreover a Passive House practitioner, I appreciate the power of data. We collect and analyze climate data, comfort data as well as post occupancy performance data and improve our designs. According to the American Psychological Association, among others, spending time and being connected to nature is “linked to both cognitive benefits and improvements in mood, mental health and emotional well-being”. Passive House design aims to have a lot of control for the interior environment of a space in terms of temperature, humidity, sound, and ambient comfort. We advocate for creating comfortable interior environments that are connected to the outside. Nothing can replace the psychological effects of the sun entering an interior space during different times of the day, or the sight out of the window of a tree dancing in the wind. Architecture aiming for happiness should both protect the inhabitant from the harshness of the surrounding environment, but allow them to embrace it if the conditions are ideal. I strongly recommend visiting the exhibition which will be open until January 20th.