Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement

Book info: Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement (Paperback, 140 pages) – The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010. Language: English.

The role of the global architect in society is changing. Instead of waiting for commissions to come their way, architects are initiating and developing practical solutions in response to dramatically changing living conditions in many parts of the world today. Small Scale, Big Change focuses on a central chapter of this shift, presenting recently built or under-construction works in underserved communities around the globe by these 11 architects and firms: Elemental (Chilean); Anna Heringer (Austrian); Diébédo Francis Kéré (Burkinabé); Hashim Sarkis A.L.U.D. (Lebanese); Jorge Mario Jáuregui (Brazilian); Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton & Jean Philippe Vassal (French); Michael Maltzan Architecture (American); Noero Wolff Architects (South African); Rural Studio (American); Estudio Teddy Cruz (American, born Guatemala); and Urban Think Tank (American/Austrian/Venezuelan). Without sacrificing concern for aesthetics, these architects have developed projects that reveal a post-utopian specificity of place; their architectural solutions emerge from close collaboration with future users and sustained research into local conditions. The projects--which include schools, parks, housing and infrastructural interventions--reveal an exciting change in the longstanding dialogue between architecture and society, as the architect's roles, methods, approaches and responsibilities are dramatically reevaluated. They also offer an expanded definition of sustainability that moves beyond experimentation with new materials and technologies to encompass larger concepts of social and economic sustainability. Small Scale, Big Change examines the evolving standards of responsibility and participation in architecture and the ways in which architects can engage critically with larger social, economic and political issues currently facing communities around the world. Editorial Reviews Review "An exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art offers a fresh flare of inspiration in the form of real buildings that have improved actual lives." --Justin Davidson, New York Magazine, October 4, 2010

Architecture is rediscovering its social conscience. That's the message behind "Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement," an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

The show, which looks at 11 projects around the world that have had major social impacts despite modest budgets and sizes, is a rebuttal to the familiar complaint that the profession is too focused on aesthetic experimentation and not enough on the lives of ordinary people. Not incidentally, it is also part of a philosophical shift in the museum's architecture and design department, which, for most of the eight decades since its founding by Philip Johnson, famously championed architecture's artistic merits over its social value.

Given that, the big surprise of the show is that so many of the projects are actually good. Organized by Andres Lepik and Margot Weller, the exhibition makes a powerful case that it is possible to create work that is both socially uplifting and architecturally compelling. It's a notion that dominated architectural thought for much of the first half of the 20th century but that seems so out of keeping with the ethos of the practice today, particularly in New York, that it's almost jarring. --Nicolai Ouroussoff, New York Times, October 14, 2010

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. "The recent global economic crisis has heightened the perception that architecture of the past decades has placed itself too much in the service of economic and political interests and has too little regard for social concerns… Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Change presents eleven projects that, taken together, offer a redefining of the architect's role in responsibility to society… Each project is the result of a dialogue in which the architect cedes parts of his or her authority to others, marking an important departure from the modernist ideal of the architect as a mastermind who designs everything from teapots to entire metropolises. By reevaluating the role they play, these architects are signaling their conviction that good design is not a privilege of the few and the powerful."

Andres Lepik, excerpted from Building on Society in .