"The home-foreclosure crisis of the last five years and the wider
international financial downturn of which it is a complex part have
shaken Americans' confidence in the future of the country's suburbs.
Suburbs have long been the sites of a key component of the American
Dream: personal ownership of a single-family home on a swath of green
lawn, an investment that once guaranteed stability and a legacy for the
next generation. This exhibition proposes that these crises have a
silver lining: they have created opportunities for radically rethinking
the building blocks of the United States' fast-growing urban fringe and
developing a new national conversation on issues of housing,
transportation, and public space. The projects in this exhibition,
developed by five interdisciplinary teams of designers, respond to the
analysis in The Buell Hypothesis (2011), a research project of the Temple Hoyne Buell center for the study of American Architecture, at Columbia University."
