Beverly Willis Featured in “Emerging Ecologies” MoMA Exhibition
Photo courtesy of Beverly Willis
Legendary architect and champion of women practitioners Beverly Willis, FAIA, is featured in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, which opened Sept. 17.
The exhibition is “dedicated to both realized and unrealized projects that address ecological and environmental concerns by architects who practiced in the United States from the 1930s through the 1990s,” MoMA said, and will present work by Frank Lloyd Wright, James Wines, R. Buckminster Fuller, Willis and Emilio Ambasz, who is also the show’s curator.
Emerging Ecologies includes an exhibition of workflow diagrams by Willis produced with CARLA in 1970. Among her most notable achievements, Willis led the in-house development and coding of the digital program Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis, resulting in its use for a 525-building housing community in Honolulu set within a non-active volcanic crater floor. Using CARLA for the analyses, Willis devised a plan for Aliamanu with 40 percent less earth-moving than called for in a previous firm’s plans, meaning less destruction to the environment and lowered construction costs, according to reporting by Engineering News-Record.
On view through Jan. 20, 2024, the CARLA diagrams join over 150 other works in Emerging Ecologies to “reconstruct how the rise of the environmental movement in the United States informed architectural practice and thought.”
Showcasing innovative, fantastical, dystopian and daring architectural projects that sought to navigate the fraught relationship between the built and natural environment, the exhibition also includes seven newly commissioned audio recordings inspired by many little-known projects on display. Voiced by women leaders in the field — Mae-ling Lokko, Jeanne Gang, Meredith Gaglio, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Amy Chester and Carolyn Dry — along with Ambasz, the six women share their thoughts on “what contemporary architects can do to mitigate against climate change.”
Emerging Ecologies is organized by Carson Chan, Matthew Wagstaffe, Dewi Tan and Eva Lavranou at the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment.
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