TROPOLISM

Barry Bergdoll's big gun out of the gate: fill the vacant lot next to MoMA with five homes, foundations and all. The exhibition opens June 20 and will explore the state-of-the-art possibilities of prefabrication. It's a brilliant beginning for Mr. Bergdoll; he continues a tradition of MoMA exhibiting around this theme, while at the same time picking a topic that is at the current intersection of architecture, social ideas, and technological capabilities.

The architects chosen all explore this topic as their firm's focus:

KieranTimberlake Associates of Philadelphia; Lawrence Sass of Cambridge, Mass.; Douglas Gauthier and Jeremy Edmiston of Manhattan; Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf of Austria; and Richard Horden of Horden Cherry Lee in London.

Perhaps the best thing is his choice to announce the exhibition as if it were opening today. The houses begin construction soon and will be complete when they are open to the public in June. We'll keep you posted.