It started in a so-called brownstone on 53rd Street, a museum founded by three ladies who lunched. It was, as Glenn Lowry writes in an essay published to coincide with the museum’s reopening, separate from the street, pointedly removed, up a set of stairs. This was not a museum that was about ‘accessibility’. It was a museum that was about a particular subculture of the wealthy and connected, until 1939, when J. Alfred Barr, the museum’s first director, commissioned its first proper home, designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone.

From 1970s to today, from Koolhaas to Hadid to UNStudio, this exhibition of drawings, models, and proposals for imagined and unbuilt spaces is a look inside an alternate history of our built environment … the one that could – and maybe one day will – have been. A tightly edited group of imagined architectural projects, shown in both drawing and model form and ranging from the 1970s to today, Dreamland is a reminder of the cultural and creative value of unrestrained architectural play, especially in today’s saturation of skeptical unveilings and launches of buildings that will never be constructed.