MoMA Exhibition: 'Foreclosed' Features 5 Visions For The Future Of America's Cities & Suburbs

A model of WORKac's Nature-City proposal for Keizer, Oregon. Photo: James Ewing.

After you attend Mitchell Joachim's Envisioning Ecological Cities lecture on Thursday, why not continue your explorations into the future of urban design with MoMA's Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream--which is on display at the museum through August 13.

Last summer five teams lead by the architecture firms MOS, Visible Weather, Studio Gang, WORKac and Zago Architecture convened at MoMA PS1, where they participated in workshops "to envision new housing and transportation infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country's suburbs."

Building on ideas from Columbia University's The Buell Hypothesis, the teams took on five different foreclosure-ravaged locations across the country and began developing proposals for "new housing and transportation infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation." The exhibition features those proposals in the form of models, renderings animations and more.

MoMA's Inside/Out blog offers a behind-the-scenes look at the workshops as they unfolded, and you'll also find more information (including lots of great models and renderings) on the exhibition's interactive website. This should hold us urban design junkies over until Joachim's Terreform ONE kicks off its month-long ONE Lab Summer 2012: Future Cities program in July!

Take a look at a few more images from Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream: 

Rendering of a shared courtyard from Studio Gang's The Garden in the Machine proposal for Cicero, Illinois.

A rendering from MOS's Thoughts on a Walking City proposal for the Oranges, New Jersey.

A diagram from Zago Architecture's Property with Properties proposal for Rialto, California.

A rendering of the view from communal offices toward a public plaza and City Hall from Visible Weather's Simultaneous City proposal for Temple Terrace, Florida. 

-- John Ruscher

Essential Event: Dr. Mitchell Joachim Envisions The Cities Of The Future This Thursday At 3rd Ward

 

Are we ready for the future? Something of a loaded question, but Dr. Mitchell Joachim will tackle it this Thursday in Envisioning Ecological Cities: The Sci-Fi Based Solution to Climate Change, a free lecture taking place right here at 3rd Ward from 7:30-9:30pm.

Mitchell is the co-founder of Terreform ONE, a nonprofit think tank dedicated to fostering ecological design and sustainability in cities around the world. From July 9 to August 3 the Brooklyn-based organization will be presenting ONE Lab Summer 2012: Future Cities, a four-week program that "will address the emerging discipline of global urbaneering by assembling a wide range of innovators from fields as diverse as architecture, material scence, urban design, biology, civil engineering and media art." ONE Lab will include a design studio, workshops and a Future Cities Seminar, which will feature speakers including vertical farming pioneer Dr. Dickson D. Despommier, architect and artist Vito Acconci and artist and engineer Natalie Jeremijenko.

Interested? Come check out Joachim's lecture on Thursday for a sneak peak of the issues and ideas that ONE Lab will address this summer. He'll talk about how urban design can work towards better and more effective solutions by anticipating and planning for the impact of innovative technologies.

Get ready by watching his appearance on The Colbert Report from back in 2009:

-- John Ruscher