A Road Map to Recovery
The Museum of Modern Art today opens its exhibition “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream,” a display of proposals to rejuvenate areas of the country that were ravaged by the foreclosure crisis. To develop these plans, five design teams, each led by a prominent architectural firm (MOS Architects, Studio Gang, WORKac, Visible Weather, and Zago Architecture) spent time in five different American communities. The MoMA exhibition presents models, renderings, data, and analysis provided by each teams, as well as background on the potential effects of design on communities’ economic future (11 W. 53rd St., nr. Sixth Ave.; 212-708-9400; moma.org; through 7/30).
My Fair Cecil
The New York School of Interior Design begins its spring 2012 lecture series tonight with a talk by Architectural Digest’s Mitchell Owens on the theatrical set and costume designs of the renowned photographer Cecil Beaton. Beaton is best remembered today for photographing some of the postwar years’ most famous faces, as well as being a favored court photographer of Queen Elizabeth II. However, Beaton also designed sets and costumes for Broadway. Over the course of his design career, Beaton won four Tony awards, including one for costume-designing the original production of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. The lecture will cover both the man and his work, and it coincides with the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition “Cecil Beaton: The New York Years” (170 E. 70th St., nr. Lexington Ave.; 6 p.m.; free with RSVP to rsvp@nysid.edu or 212-492-1500, ext. 405; nysid.edu).
Close Encounters of the Sculptural Kind
Among the many artists, collectives, and concepts represented at the second New Museum triennial exhibition, “The Ungovernables,” is Argentine sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas, whose room-size installations and outdoor works render alien forms in terrestrial clay. After representing Argentina at last year’s Venice Biennale with a work titled The Murderer of Your Heritage, his project for the Ungovernables is a site-specific sculpture in the museum’s fourth-floor gallery called A person loved me, an installation of obsolete robot machinery and weaponry created to evoke a sense of loss, a sense of dread, and the feeling of suspended time (235 Bowery, at Prince St.; 212-219-1222; newmuseum.org; through 4/22).
Gridlock Gossip
Even things like traffic are subject to the wills and ideas of design. Tonight, the Museum of the City of New York will invite traffic engineers and city planners to discuss the problems of traffic flow in New York. The panelists will include Sam Schwartz, a former employee of the city’s bygone Traffic Department and official coiner of the word gridlock, city deputy commissioner Bruce Schaller, Jeffrey Zupan of the Regional Plan Association, along with guest curator Hilary Ballon as moderator (1220 Fifth Ave.; nr. 103rd St.; 6:30 p.m.; $12, $8 seniors and students, $6 museum members; 212-534-1672; mcny.org).