April 20, 2022
by Center for Architecture
A crowd looks at architecture models and drawings in a gallery space.
Photo: Sam Lahoz.
Window with hanging poster boards with architectural drawings and photographs.
Photo: Sam Lahoz.
A man gestures towards a shelf with exhibition elements, including a model of three houses.
Photo: Sam Lahoz.
A group stands behind a large architectural site model while a man points at the model.
Photo: Sam Lahoz.
A man and a woman stand in front of a shelf with architectural models.
Co-curators Barry Bergdoll and Juliana Barton lead a tour of the exhibition. Photo: Sam Lahoz.
Two individuals stand in front of a white wall with blue text that reads "Aging Against the Machine."
Members of the Aging Against the Machine team. Photo: Sam Lahoz.
Six individuals stand in front of a white wall with large-scale graphic orange text and smaller text in black.
Members of the Decolonizing Suburbia team. Photo: Sam Lahoz.
Six individuals stand in front of a green wall with a large map.
Members of the Re: Play team. Photo: Sam Lahoz.
Three individuals behind a large architectural model of a site stand in front of a white wall with purple text that reads "Block" Party.
Members of the Block Party team. Photo: Sam Lahoz.

On Thursday, April 14, hundreds of visitors gathered at the Center for Architecture for the opening of Reset: Towards a New Commons. The exhibition, which takes up all three floors of the Center for Architecture, analyzes architecture’s role in envisioning new dynamics of living and community.

First planned for 2020, before the pandemic upended our lives, Reset was originally meant to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Co-curators Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology, 19th- and 20th-century Architectural History at Columbia University, and Juliana Barton, Director of the Center for the Arts at Northeastern University, set out to develop an exhibition that would foster dialogues about designing more diverse and inclusive communities while engaging a panoply of issues including disability, aging, racial and economic segregation, and other forms of societal fragmentation.

Rather than merely selecting existing work to showcase on our walls, the curators launched a call for proposals soliciting interdisciplinary solutions to building community. Four projects—one focusing on New York City, one on Cincinnati, Ohio, and two in the San Francisco Bay Area—were selected in 2021, each offering a unique approach to  living collaboratively and designing  inclusion.

We hope you will visit the Center for Architecture and join us in discussing how we can build more inclusive and equitable communities!

Reset will be on view through September 3, 2022.