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Museums and industry | Future Observatory

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‘What role can museums play in supporting not just industrial strategy but the fundamental economic and social shifts required by the green transition?’ In 1949, the Museum of Modern Art in New York built the first of a series of houses in its garden aimed at modernising housebuilding in the US. Designed by Marcel Breuer, this commuter house was meant to be modern, affordable and easy to build. As MoMA put it at the time, adequate housing was 'today's primary architectural problem'. Leaving aside MoMA’s self-appointed role in defining ‘modern architecture’ and ‘good design’ – a canon it helped codify through a series of exhibitions in the 1940s and 50s – the institution saw itself in relation not just to a museum-going public but to industry. In post-war Europe and the US, this was not unusual, with exhibitions and trade fairs playing a critical role in modernising both industrial production and public taste in burgeoning consumer societies (think of the Britain Can Make It exhibition

‘What role can museums play in supporting not just industrial strategy but the fundamental economic and social shifts required by the green transition?’ In 1949, the Museum of Modern Art in New York built the first of a series of houses in its garden aimed at modernising housebuilding in the US. Designed by Marcel Breuer, this commuter house was meant to be modern, affordable and easy to build. As MoMA put it at the time, adequate housing was 'today's primary architectural problem'. Leaving aside MoMA’s self-appointed role in defining ‘modern architecture’ and ‘good design’ – a

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