MoMA
“Design and the Elastic Mind” opened February 24 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and runs through May 12. This new exhibition focuses on how architecture – and the design world in general – are responding and adapting to momentous changes in technology, science and social mores.
In its incredible, wide-ranging display of ideas, the show explores ‘computational origami’, ‘tagging’, ‘extreme visualization’, ‘biomimicry’, ‘sensory design’ and many more advanced and emerging concepts. The premise behind all of this is that in recent decades people are experiencing fundamental changes in all aspects of human life.
According to the show’s curators:
”..people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change.”
Writing “The Soul in the New Machines” in The New York Times, reporter Nicolai Ouroussoff describes “the exhibition’s overarching theme, the ability to switch fluidly from the scale of the atom to the scale of entire cities, may sound a death knell for the tired ideological divides of the last century, between modernity and history, technology and man, individual and collective. It should be required viewing for anyone who believes that our civilization is heading back toward the Dark Ages.”
One of the exhibits, “Rules of Six, 2007” (below), uses algorithms to fashion an organically-based architecture. In this, a collaboration between Aranda/Lasch, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the artists declare that:
“New design approaches in science, design, and architecture have replaced a top-down description of form by bottom-up rules of formation: materials carry information within them about how to behave, grow, combine, assemble, and proliferate. Rules of Six is an open exploration of self-assembly and modularity across scales.”
IMAGE: MoMA
