Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront

In 2009, MoMA and MoMA PS1 joined forces to address one of the most urgent challenges facing the nation’s largest city: sea-level rise resulting from global climate change. Rising Currents began with an architects-in-residence program at MoMA PS1 that brought together five interdisciplinary teams to re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor and to imagine new ways to occupy the harbor itself with adaptive “soft” infrastructures that are sympathetic to the needs of a sound ecology. The resulting proposals offered creative solutions that addressed the rising water levels around New York.

The subsequent exhibition at MoMA in 2010 presented the five proposals developed during the architects-in-residence program, and included a wide array of models, drawings, and analytical materials. In 2012, MoMA produced a publication that summarized the projects.

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, was organized by Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design.

The exhibition was made possible by The Rockefeller Foundation. It was the first of five exhibitions in the series Issues in Contemporary Architecture, supported by Andre Singer.