MoMA PS1, the cultural heart of the increasingly gentrified neighborhood of Long Island City, played host to a museum-wide EXPO I: New York in a summer-long series exploring environmental challenges and possible futures evidenced through installations, exhibitions, and events.  Creative endeavors ranging from the experiential to the socially relevant and ecologically engaged rethought the museum from the ground-up by presenting simultaneous solo installations, group exhibits, and built interventions that transformed the MoMA PS1 campus and outlying locations throughout the city.

EXPO I: New York emerged in the shadow of twin challenges facing architects and society. Buenos Aires-based architecture firm a77 acknowledged the inevitability of economic uncertainties and natural disasters with a temporal and self-sufficient installation, Colony, where several members actually lived for its duration.(fig. 1) Envisioned as a communal utopia and model for future living, Colony served as a platform for researching alternative uses of public space.  Yet, a77’s projective approach to the civic realm as postulation rather than  formal response shares striking similarities with MoMA’s iconic Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition of 1972 currently being revisited in an exhibition at the Graham Foundation in Chicago.  That exhibit was intermingled within various indoor and outdoor areas of MoMA’s building in midtown Manhattan, where architects and designers engaged in conceptually driven and ideologically substantive work. Various environments were framed through postulation, commentary, and counter-design, while the term “environment” itself implied diverse connotations ranging from the environmental design movement to its more current relationship with ecology.  Most similar to Colony, a proposal for a mobile living unit by Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper challenged domesticity in relation to emergency conditions and disaster relief.  Their scenario responded to earthquakes, cyclones, floods, and fires, while suggesting a more subversive role relative to post-apocalyptic survival.

Separated by forty years, but sharing a similar narrative of destruction and economic volatility, a77 mobilized to reconsider building within an unstable world. Partners Gustavo Diéguez and Lucas Gilardi designed Colonyin the MoMA PS1 outdoor courtyard as a stage set where artists, architects, designers, and scholars were invited to communally live and work. For PS1, the architects reimagined such challenges to find new alternatives to the conventional house (fig. 2). The installation incorporated recycled and salvaged materials to create temporary housing which privileged economy, practicality, and improvisation (fig. 3).

It was raining on Colony when I visited, but it was hard not to sense the optimism and in some sense, the fantasy, that it evoked.  Most notably, the installation focused on process rather than product and preferenced nuance, rather than form. Here, past utopias were re-tuned to reigning paradigms with updated values that trace their origins to the 1960s counter-culture and its back-to-the-earth simplicity. While the first ecological movement resisted Space Age modernism and technological advancement at all costs, Colony embraced a shared sensibility through a renewed and less naïve filter. Installed like a vignette from a Summer of Love campsite in Woodstock, Colony offered a decidedly un-monumental view of future living as the utopian vision for society. Trailers, tents, solar-powered showers, hydroponic gardens, and a low-tech kitchen were blended together to engage both the social and the sustainable parameters of performance.(fig. 4) Sunscreen curtains were hung atmospherically over this makeshift refugee art camp, focusing a narrative while shielding the space from the elements.(fig. 5)  The ensemble evoked the performance-based shop windows commissioned for Barney’s and designed by fashion icon Daphne Guinness.

The real impact of Colony and its relevance to the virtues of incrementalism and adaptation are more authentically found at 5Pointz.  Sadly, PS1 appears generally aloof to the plight of 5Pointz. As Colony idealized a utopian though generally sterilized view of the future—the daily rituals and very real lives of artists, architects, and designers were being lived just across the street—if only for a little while longer.