AT THE SCREENING OF MOMA’S BUILT ECOLOGIES SERIES

Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, which closed on January 20, 2024, was the first exhibit organized by Carson Chan at the helm of MoMA’s Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment. To mark the occasion, the Ambasz Institute recently invited 120 guests for a screening of Built Ecologies: Architecture and the Environment, a six-part video series co-produced by the Museum of Modern Art’s Creative Team and PIN–UP. As a publicly accessible series of videos, Built Ecologies functions as a companion to the now-closed exhibition, which traced how architects in the U.S. reacted to the burgeoning modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 70s. Built Ecologies’s 10-minute (approx) episodes similarly highlight architects and artists who profoundly engage with environmental thinking in their distinct practices, including SITE founder James Wines, animal architecture expert Joyce Hwang, aquarium architect Peter Chermayeff, Hawaiʻi Non-Linear’s Sean Connelly and Dominic Leong, and feminist Land Art pioneer Mary Miss. Emilio Ambasz, described as “the Godfather of Green Architecture,” is the protagonist of the sixth and final episode. With the exception of Connelly and Ambasz, all of the films’ subjects were in attendance for the event and took part in a panel moderated by PIN–UP’s Felix Burrichter and Michael Bullock. Wines, Hwang, Chermayeff, Leong, and Miss gathered beneath the screen to discuss their reactions to seeing the films in conversation with one another, grappling with the tricky question of how their work fits into a definition of modernism more broadly — a query that invoked calls for broadening the canon by bringing us back to earth, so to speak. To paraphrase Chermayeff’s response: these environmental matters are so urgent that it renders the question itself irrelevant. To watch the entire series, click here or see below.