What’s Happening At Climate Week? At MoMA, You Can See The Dolphin Embassy

21.09.2023 - 15:43 / forbes.com

Nobody appointed Doug Michaels to serve as an ambassador of the human race. But the position, which he assumed in 1977, promised to have far greater significance than ambassadorships to China or the Soviet Union. He and co-ambassadors Alexandra Morphett and Robert Perry proposed nothing less than to develop diplomatic relations with a nonhuman species. Their seaborne embassy sought direct communication with dolphins.

The embassy was first conjured in the pages of Esquire, where the avant-garde art collective Ant Farm – of which Michaels was a founding member – presented architectural drawings of a triangular vessel propelled by a sail with underwater passageways where dolphins and people could meet. The mode of interspecies communication remained open to discussion. Inspired by the 1960s scientific experiments of John C. Lilly and Margaret Howe Lovatt, who unsuccessfully attempted to decode dolphins clicks and blows in an oceanside laboratory, the ambassadors envisioned the two species learning from one another by spending time together. (This being the ‘70s, they also didn’t rule out telepathy.)

Although the embassy was never built, and the ambassadors never established a line of communication with “delphic civilization”, the project initiated by Ant Farm and developed with Morphett and Perry is recognized today as an important expansion of environmentalism to consider more-than-human perspectives. Artifacts of the Dolphin Embassy are a highlight of Emerging Ecologies, a multifaceted survey of American architectural responses to the environmental movement at the Museum of Modern Art.

In the words of the curators, the exhibition seeks to reveal “new ways of living on this planet”, especially those suggested by “daring, inclusive, and… disruptive architectural proposals of the past.” Unsurprisingly, few are as overtly daring as the Dolphin Embassy. Many are quite practically focused on energy conservation and reduction of waste. They might even appear mundane.

For instance, the exhibition includes several attempts to moderate the effects of intemperate weather through passive cooling and heating. Architects including Ralph Knowles developed methods for determining the optimal position of buildings based on the path traveled by the sun through the seasons. The principles are still applicable to city planning.

Other designers focused on maximizing thermal inertia in housing. Seeking to improve upon the heat retention of thick walls, Mária Telkes and Eleanor Raymond invented a solar-powered radiator loaded with phase-changing salts. Although their “heat bin” burned bright in the media, it failed to ignite interest in the construction industry.

At the most extreme, artificial homeostasis was proposed for