MoMA & MoMA PS! Present FORECLOSED: REHOUSING THE AMERICAN DREAM

The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 announce a 14-month initiative to examine new architectural possibilities for American cities and suburbs in the context of the recent foreclosure crisis in the United States. Organized by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA's Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, with Reinhold Martin, Director of Columbia University's Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream will enlist five interdisciplinary teams of architects to envision a rethinking of housing and related infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country's suburbs. Drawing on ideas proposed in The Buell Hypothesis, a forthcoming research publication by Mr. Martin, and Leah Meisterlin and Anna Kenoff of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center, the teams will participate in a four-month workshop phase beginning in May, with each team focused on a specific "megaregion," a metropolitan area that lies within a corridor between two major cities. The resulting proposals will be exhibited at MoMA from January 31, 2012 through July 31, 2012.

"The foreclosure crisis has led to a major loss of confidence in the suburban dream of single-family houses on private lots reachable only by car," said Mr. Bergdoll. "New paradigms of architecture, and regional and transportation planning, could well be the silver lining in the crisis of home ownership. This has hit especially hard in suburbs. It is here, rather than in the next ring of potential sprawl, where architects, landscape designers, artists, ecologists, and elected officials need to rethink reshaping urban America for the coming decades."

"The assumptions underlying the suburban dream and its accompanying social and environmental crises have gone unchallenged for too long," said Mr. Martin. "It's time for a national conversation on these issues. Architecture and urbanism can help develop such a conversation by offering tangible examples to be debated in public. The Buell Hypothesis sets the stage for such a conversation by claiming that to change the dream is to change the city. To confront the cultural assumptions that underlay suburbanization is to begin the process of changing the way we live today."

For the workshop phase of Foreclosed, teams will be challenged to respond with a proposal that offers new and inventive ways of thinking about the relationship between land, housing, infrastructure, urban form, and that which is considered "public" about today's cities and suburbs. Projects will aim to challenge cultural assumptions concerning homeownership and associated settlement patterns, such as suburban sprawl, and assist the public in contemplating a potentially different future for housing and cities. The design teams will develop projects under the curatorial and critical guidance of the MoMA Architecture and Design Department and the Buell Center, and will have the opportunity to utilize studio space at MoMA PS1.