For more than five decades, David Goldblatt has used his camera to document his native South Africa, illuminating apartheid’s impact on a changing society. His photographs do not focus on major political events or horrifying violence, but are rather images of everyday life. With an attitude informed by his own experiences of anti-Semitism, Goldblatt chronicles an evocative span of South African culture: the Afrikaners of Dutch descent that he once served in his father’s clothing store; a dancing lesson in a small middle-class community; a widow’s simple home in one of the “puppet states” where blacks were forced to live; and the racialized geography of today’s Johannesburg. Perceiving his photographs more like prisms than mirrors, Goldblatt aims not to duplicate this reality but rather to “offer a changed direction or view of it.” From his perspective, South African structures are not architecture but expressions of value, and a property developer’s speculative house in the Tzaneen district (1989, above) not “authentic Cape Dutch,” as claimed, but in fact a “grossly corrupted version of that form.” Each of the 150 black-and-white silver gelatin prints on view, taken between 1948 and 2009, include precise captions written by the artist. The exhibition also includes a timeline of events in South African history and an excerpt from a 1985 documentary about the photographer.

Comprised of 437 milk crates, plywood ribs, and shade-tolerant Monkey Grass, a lushly planted vault makes the newest contribution to the evolving landscape of Governors Island. The low-tech, zero-impact structure by Behrang Behin and Ann Ha was chosen as the winner of the City of Dreams Pavilion Competition 2010, which called for a temporary gathering place with a low environmental footprint. Intrigued by systems that are neither entirely natural nor artificial, the architects went for a synthetic hybrid that could harness nature’s productive capacity by relying on an emphatically unnatural infrastructure. The two recent GSD alums—Ha used Governors Island as the subject of her thesis—envisioned a future where nature is brought back into the city, not to replace its dense vitality, but to add some green to the mix. Grass growing on the outer surface helps to keep the roots of the Monkey Grass cool, while structural connections are designed to minimize the labor required for assembly. The modular nature of the milk crates also enables their deconstruction and distribution to community gardens around the city, which allows reuse rather than recycling and makes the installation temporary and sustainable at once. The annual competition, organized for the first time this year, was sponsored by FIGMENT, the AIA’s Emerging New York Architects Committee, and the Structural Engineers Association of New York.