In reviewing MoMA's upcoming exhibit Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement Christopher Hawthorne suggests that the growing trend of exhibitions focusing on so-called "humanitarian design" says more about a recent change in curatorial interest, in museum architecture departments more broadly, than a real sea of change sweeping the design industries.
In reviewing MoMA's upcoming exhibit Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement Christopher Hawthorne suggests that the growing trend of exhibitions focusing on so-called "humanitarian design" says more about a recent change in curatorial interest, in museum architecture departments more broadly, than a real sea of change sweeping the design industries. Read more in the LA Times
He concludes however by noting that regardless; these moments of official recognition are hardly irrelevant. For one thing, they expose innovative work to foundations, public agencies and other potential funders, who play a far bigger role in humanitarian design than they do in architecture commissioned by deep-pocketed clients.
And it's important to remember that for most visitors to the MoMA show — oblivious to the design world's internecine battles — the work on the walls, and the approach to architectural practice it represents, will be entirely new. For a group of architects dedicated to a decidedly populist view of the world, that is no small thing.
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This was inevitable. Architecture is going thorough the biggest change in many decades. Unless it is grabbed by the style mongers and reduced to a formal movement for the wanna be poor, it will sweep the entire way architecture has been practiced last few centuries on wealthy patron>architect model.
Just to localize the scene, Archinect has been the host of few features on the subject in last few years. Quickly comes to mind are; Bryan Finoki's work on Wes Janz, "One Small Project: Interview with Wes Janz" and "Compared to What?", my recent interviews with "IABR director George Brugmans" and with Ole Bouman "On Survival", by Şevin Yıldız With Teddy Cruz on "Power" and "Powerlessness" and, recent three part feature by Aaron Plewke, "The Extraordinary vs. the Everyday Catastrophe: Part 1, 2 & 3" contributed by Derek Hoeferlin, Jess Garz and Stan Strembicki.
Fueled and exhilarated by the economic changes and other realities, this "movement" is going to be the concern of the built environment and it will bring many changes to how we practice architecture and urbanism and how they are thought. The formal discussions of space and materiality will be critiqued by a new and more urgent outlook on real life on the ground, including project's value and benefit to public, availability of the technologies to where it is most needed and the political conditions that controls distribution of wealth and well being.
Similar attempts were quickly killed by marginalization in the past, but this time dire consequences of business as usual are better charted than ever.
It is about time...
And of course, the occupation of museum "business" and its curators has been taking anything popular with any possibility of commodification and usually turning it into a marketable cultural production. That, I don't want to elaborate any further on top of Christopher Hawthorne's.
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