This exhibition presents selected drawings from Keith Krumwiede's book, Atlas of Another America, which features two experiments in architectural storytelling, Freedomland and New Homes for America.  In much the same way that commercial homebuilders routinely pillage their own stock of available plans, with these projects, Krumwiede pirates the same stock plans for the production of novel domestic assemblies in which collective needs square up with individual desires. Freedomland, the book’s main storyline, presents a grand vision for a fictional utopia of superhomes—either extra large villas or extra small villages—distributed in a checkerboard fashion across Thomas Jefferson’s great American grid. New Homes for America, on the other hand, tells a more modest story in which a young architect, working under the pressure of a deadline, produces new forms for collective living. (She is, of course, fired.) With both projects, the American obsession with detached single-family houses, the most multiplied—and denigrated—architectural product of the last century, is upended with the aim of dislodging other possible futures for the American Dream.

The exhibition begins Monday, February 13 in the 3rd Floor Hallway Gallery and is on view through Sunday, February 26, 2017.

This event is open to current Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff.