MoMA’s “Down to Earth” Rethinks Architecture From the Soil Up

Photo: CAVE_BUREAU Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi The Anthropocene Museum – Of Steam and Struggle, 2019 Courtesy of CAVE BUREAU

Down to Earth brings Bruno Latour, climate thinking, and “more-than-human” design into the museum’s architecture galleries

For much of the 20th century, modern architecture wanted to rise above the mess of the world. It lifted buildings on pilotis, separated living spaces from damp soil, and treated the ground as something to escape: too wet, too dirty, too full of insects, decay, and disease.

MoMA’s Down to Earth starts from a very different instinct. Rather than imagining architecture as a clean object hovering above the planet, the exhibition asks what happens when design lowers itself back into contact with soil, water, animals, plants, weather, and all the fragile systems that make life possible.

Presented in Gallery 216 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the exhibition takes its title from Bruno Latour’sbook Down to Earth and brings his thinking into conversation with contemporary architectural practice. At its centre is the idea of the “critical zone”: the thin, life-filled layer between bedrock and atmosphere where ecological, geological, and human systems collide. 

The projects on view move architecture away from heroic isolation and towards entanglement. Instead of treating the earth as a passive base for human ambition, they imagine the ground as an active collaborator: something that shapes, resists, nourishes, floods, shelters, and remembers. Here, design becomes less about domination and more about negotiation.

That shift opens the exhibition into a wider field of life. The presentation includes projects that engage with flood-adaptive housing, animal sanctuaries, land restoration, cave systems, and structures conceived not only for humans, but for other species too. Across these works, architecture becomes a way of asking how we might live with the planet rather than simply on top of it. 

What makes Down to Earth interesting is that it doesn’t frame sustainability as a technical add-on. It treats ecological pressure as something that changes the very imagination of architecture. A building is no longer just an object, an image, or a property asset. It is part of a living system: porous, vulnerable, and dependent on everything around it.

Organised by Evangelos Kotsioris and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel with MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, the exhibition sits inside the museum’s ongoing collection galleries, which makes its argument feel less like a temporary warning and more like a structural shift in how architecture is being understood.