Last summer, New York's Museum of Modern Art invited five teams of architects, planners, ecologists, engineers, landscape designers, and other specialists in the urban and suburban condition, including Joint Center Managing Director Eric Belsky, to develop proposals for housing that would open new routes through the mortgage-foreclosure crisis that continues to afflict the United States.
Establishing studios at MoMA PS1, MoMA's Long Island City affiliate, the teams set out to imagine new models of housing, thinking not only of its physical form but of the systems of infrastructure and finance that support it. Their focus was not the inner city, but rather the suburbs, which are often passed over in the push of development toward an ever-more-distant periphery.
Working with the findings of The Buell Hypothesis, a research report prepared by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, each team focused on a specific town in one of five regions—the Northeast, the Southeast, the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and the Southwest—and each developed an inventive proposal that reimagined existing patterns of living, working, and home ownership. Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream lays out their ideas, through detailed illustrations of their projects and through essays by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA's Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Reinhold Martin, Director of the Buell Center.
The exhibit will be on display at MoMA from February 15–July 30, 2012.
Read more about the project on the MoMA exhibit website and/or the specific region Eric Belsky worked on, The Oranges, NJ.