MoMA Exhibit: Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream

Rendering of WORKac’s Nature-City for Keizer, Oregon. Image courtesy WORKac

Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream
February 15-July 30, 2012
The Robert Menschel Architecture and Design Gallery, third floor
Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, a major initiative to examine new architectural possibilities for American cities and suburbs in the context of the recent foreclosure crisis in the United States, culminates in an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art from February 15 through July 30, 2012.

Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream was jointly conceived and organized by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA's Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Reinhold Martin, Director of Columbia University's Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. Bergdoll and Martin invited five interdisciplinary teams of architects—including members with expertise in economics, finance, housing, and public policy, in addition to architect team leaders—to develop proposals that offer new and inventive ways of thinking about the relationships among land, housing, infrastructure, urban form, and public spaces, for five sites across the country—near New York; Chicago; Tampa; Los Angeles; and Portland, Oregon—located in metropolitan areas that lie within a corridor between two major cities.

Rendering of Studio Gang Architects’ The Garden in the Machine project for Cicero, Illinois. Image courtesy Studio Gang Architects.

The five sites chosen have characteristics that make them particularly pertinent to nationwide challenges associated with the international financial downturn, including a significant rate of foreclosure, and a considerable amount of publicly held land available for development.

The teams developed proposals based on the ideas drawn from The Buell Hypothesis, a research publication (available at www.buellcenter.org and summarized in the publication accompanying the exhibition) by Mr. Martin, and Leah Meisterlin and Anna Kenoff of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center, which envisions a rethinking of housing and related infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the American suburbs.

The resultant proposals are not a set of blueprints for the development of specific places so much as an array of visions that invite rethinking the physical and financial architecture of living, working, and commuting in the extended suburbs.