Architecture is rediscovering its social conscience. That’s the message behind “Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 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 ordinary people.

Many of the projects are, surprisingly, actually good. 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 now seems almost jarring.

In juxtaposing a photo of a mudbrick school in Burkina Faso, designed by Diebedo Francis Kere, with one of an arts center in inner-city Los Angeles, corporate towers rising in the distance, the show sends a clear political message : architecture’s potential as an agent of social healing is not restricted to the developing world.

One of the most thoughtful and potentially far-reaching projects is the nearly complete renovation of a lowincome Modernist apartment tower by Frederic Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean Philippe Vassal in Paris.

Rather than demolish it, the architects essentially carved up the tower. Facades were replaced with windows and prefabricated greenhouselike balconies. Interior walls were torn out. By renovating the building one floor at a time, the architects avoided the social disruption typically caused by wholesale demolition.

And it reflected an attentiveness to the ecological costs of tearing something down and rebuilding from scratch. But it was also symbolic: The act of ripping off the facades is a reaction against our tendency to keep the poor hidden away. An even more heartening project is Urban-Think Tank’s Metro Cable in Caracas, Venezuela. Built on a steep hillside and cut off from the city by a freeway, the area, in one of the city’s most notorious barrios, it is an almost impenetrable maze .

Instead of plowing streets through the ghetto, which would have displaced thousands, Urban-Think Tank’s proposal threaded a cable car system through the barrio . Only a few houses would have to be demolished to connect a virtually inaccessible neighborhood to the city center, where many of its inhabitants work.

And the barrio would remain car free, preserving one of its few positive urban qualities. And the cable car stations could become spaces for public programs. This appreciation for the value of life, no matter how poor , is apparent throughout the show.


NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF/REVIEW