he exhibition Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, presented at the Museum of Modern Art, unfurls a rich and at times contradictory panorama of architectural responses to ecological consciousness since the mid-20th century, positioning landmark projects such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and the Dover Sun House within a genealogy of environmentally aware design that is as fraught with symbolic gestures as it is animated by genuine technological innovation; beginning with Wright’s picturesque yet environmentally intrusive masterpiece — where “organic” masked ecological disruption — the show juxtaposes this with Eleanor Raymond and Mária Telkes’ forward-looking solar experiment, thereby framing a dialectic between aesthetic environmentalism and functional ecological architecture, a tension that underpins much of the exhibit’s curatorial ambition; the section “Enclosed Ecologies” furthers this narrative with R. Buckminster Fuller’s domes, including the Climatron and the utopian — if terrifying — Dome Over Manhattan, exemplifying how postwar design often pursued environmental control over harmony, culminating in speculative escapism like NASA’s suburban space colonies, while “Environment as Information” introduces data-driven pioneers like Ian McHarg and Beverly Willis, whose cartographies and computational tools radically reframed land use and environmental comprehension as systems-based design approaches; diverging into “Life Forms” and “Critical Experiments,” the exhibit embraces the margins, where speculative biodesign, performative rituals, and indigenous protest movements challenge the traditional boundaries of architectural practice, though they often remain peripheral to the profession’s mainstream narratives, which remain seduced by spectacle and patronage, as epitomised by the dominance of Emilio Ambasz — whose financial support anchors the exhibition yet also clouds it with the scent of vanity branding; and while “Green Poetics” returns the visitor to romantic integrations of landscape and building, the most cogent message emerges not from visual form but from the idea that true environmental architecture may not lie in new structures at all, but in adaptive reuse, political resistance to destructive projects, and the critical restraint to design less, suggesting that the salvation of the planet cannot be entrusted to buildings that look green, but to choices that refuse construction in the name of sustainability (Freeman, 2023). Freeman, B. (2023). Aesthetic Environmentalism. Places Journal, November. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026. https://doi.org/10.22269/231121
