How Today’s Young Architects Are Building the Future

The best architecture entails more than just designing pretty spaces.

The 2015 Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Selgascano. PHOTO: IWAN BAAN

Enthusiasm for large-scale statement architecture may have reached a breaking point. And the timing couldn’t be better for the rising young architects who have already moved away from the idea of architecture as big shapes and spaces.

In Japan, a controversial $2 billion stadium designed by the world-famous architect Zaha Hadid for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo was recently canceled with harsh words about its spaceship, or turtle-like, appearance from prominent local architects and about its ballooning costs from the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

In Manhattan, the $4 billion spike-crowned transit station designed by Santiago Calatrava at the World Trade Center has been attracting more criticism than praise for what was intended to be an emblematic capstone. On a site nearby, the performing-arts center—once touted as a major Frank Gehry project—has been drastically scaled back in size and cost.

Meanwhile, in Queens, thousands of well-wishers are turning up to celebrate Cosmo (and also the Warm Up summer music series) by Spanish-born architect Andrés Jaque, winner of the Young Architects Program sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1. Cosmo—a two-story canopy of looping tubes flowing with nitrate-gobbling algae draped over a pair of turquoise-colored crop irrigator chassis—is designed to purify 3,000 gallons of waste water in four to nine days. It was inspired by a United Nations report estimating that by 2025 two-thirds of the world’s population will live in places without enough clean water.

In acknowledging that his project is more network than architecture, Mr. Jaque is anticipating, he has said, that in the future architecture “will not be that much about space but how we interact with resources.” The name of the 12-year-old firm reveals its aims: Office for Political Innovation. Cosmo is on view through Sept. 7.

MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program, now in its 16th iteration with spinoffs in Italy, Turkey, Chile and Korea, is one of a handful of programs in the U.S. and abroad funding small-scale building and exhibitions that encourage designs drawing from related and far-flung disciplines. These efforts serve as bellwethers, showing how decisively a new generation of architects departs from traditional notions of what it means to design.

Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation’s Cosmo at MoMA PS1. PHOTO: MIGUEL DE GUZMAN

The Architectural League of New York has fostered the most adventuresome ideas from young architects for longer than anyone else. Since 1981, the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers has each year awarded emerging architectural practices with the chance to exhibit and lecture on what they believe architecture should be.

One of this year’s six winners—the firm Landing Studio, founded by Dan Adams and Marie Adams in Somerville, Mass.—has added port facilities, industrial park reclamation, demolition plans and research into mining operations to the more standard architect’s slate of designing headquarters and cultural institutions. A primary focus of the firm is rehabilitating the terrible-looking leftovers of global industries by turning the brownfields cluttered with rusting derricks and abandoned oil tanks into community parks. The dank underworld beneath I-93, the architects propose, could easily be recast as parking and green spaces for storm-water management.

The work of all six winners of the League Prize was featured this summer at the “Authenticity” exhibition at Parsons School of Design and a sold-out lecture series in June. Among the atypical projects were two by architects based in Ann Arbor, Mich.: models for irrigation infrastructure to improve village-scale food production by Clark Thenhaus, and some aluminum tree stumps with tiny gesticulating arms by Thom Moran, who argues that there needs to be a place for humor in architecture.

In London for the past 15 years, the construction of a new Serpentine Pavilion has been a major midsummer event. Each year a different architect is selected to design a pavilion set in the rolling lawns of Kensington Gardens. The compact structure is not only meant to be a public tea house and party space for fundraising by the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, but also a statement about the art of architecture. In the past, the commission has gone to high-profile talents such as Mr. Gehry, Ms. Hadid and Daniel Libeskind. More recently, less familiar names have been invited into the fold; last year, Chilean architect Smiljan Radic’s ovoid pavilion, inspired by an Oscar Wilde fairy tale, was visited by some 200,000 people. This year, Spanish architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano of the firm Selgascano stretched iridescent-colored beach-chair webbing and the plastic sheeting material ETFE over a wormhole-shaped steel armature. The pavilion, open through Oct. 18, suggests a many-headed caterpillar by children’s illustrator Eric Carle. The response to it has been tepid, with critics questioning the continuing relevance of architecture as an art folly. There were calls for future commissions to aim for something more useful—such as a bus shelter, classroom or even housing for communities in need. The Serpentine Gallery, not to mention its chairman Michael Bloomberg, is excellent at knowing which way the wind blows. And late in June, the gallery director announced that a rethink was in fact in the works. It’s a small change, but a welcome one, which shows that the best architecture entails far more than simply designing pretty spaces—it can solve pressing social problems.

The signs of a seismic generational shift may be subtle and, for now, escape the notice of the larger public. But they are there and they herald a move away from architecture as expensive visual statements that are unsustainably large and challenging to maintain. Perhaps, change is not really so far off: Standing in the courtyard of MoMA PS1 and looking past Cosmo, it is impossible not to notice that a new condominium across the street is already equipped with wind turbines.