The Museum of Modern Art Appoints Carson Chan as the First Director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Envirornment

The Museum of Modern Art announces the appointment of Carson Chan as the first director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment. Mr. Chan will also serve as a curator in the Museum’s Department of Architecture and Design, where he will lead initiatives focused on ecology and sustainability in collaboration with all six of the Museum’s curatorial departments. In his role as director of the Ambasz Institute, he will develop a robust and diverse roster of exhibitions, along with digital and onsite programs that address the interconnectedness of architecture and ecology. He will also create a strategy for the collection that focuses on works dealing with sustainability. Mr. Chan will begin in his new role later this summer, and will organize and present a major exhibition focused on the emergence of ecological thinking in architecture, scheduled for 2023.

The goals of the Ambasz Institute, through a range of curatorial programs and research initiatives, are to foster dialogue, promote conversation, and facilitate research around the relationship between the built and the natural environment—making the interaction between architecture and ecology visible and accessible to Museum visitors and the wider public while highlighting the urgent need for an ecological recalibration. The Ambasz Institute will focus in particular on digital initiatives in order to both advance a global conversation on this crucial issue and ensure that the Institute reaches a diverse audience. The Institute, to be located on MoMA’s Midtown Manhattan campus within the Department of Architecture and Design, will specifically study creative approaches to design at all scales of the built environment—buildings, cities, landscapes, and objects—in order to work toward an ecologically sustainable future and environmental justice. The Emilio Ambasz Institute is an integral part of the Department of Architecture and Design, and will contribute to its wide-reaching programs and activities.