When Art Asks the Same Questions We Do Every Day

I visited the New Museum last week, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Not because of the robot gallery or the towering new OMA-designed building — though both are worth the trip — but because of one quiet corner on the fourth floor that stopped me in my tracks. The fourth floor of New Humans: Memories of the Future is dedicated entirely to cities of the imagination  — tabletop models of places that were dreamed up but never built. And standing there, surrounded by these miniature utopias, I kept thinking. Each one was created during a period of rapid change, when the way people lived was shifting faster than the cities around them could keep up. Sound familiar?

The Cities We Imagine vs. The Cities We Build

Floating above the models are Anicka Yi’s large-scale squid-like flying machines, called aerobes, drifting through the air above miniature cityscapes — including Bodys Isek Kingelez’s intricate, festively painted Afrofuturist “extreme maquette” Ghost Town, and architectural models by Constant Nieuwenhuys from his 1960s vision of an automated, anticapitalist city called New Babylon. Constant’s premise was that once machines took over labor, cities could be redesigned entirely around human connection and creativity rather than commerce. We are living through exactly that question right now. Remote work reshaped demand overnight. Entire neighborhoods shifted. Buyers stopped asking “how close is the office?” and started asking “what does this place make me feel?” The gap between the city we have and the city people actually want has never felt wider or more like a real estate opportunity.

What This Has to Do with Your Next Deal

Here’s what struck me most: every one of those imagined cities was built in response to a moment of rapid, disorienting change — industrialization, the aftermath of war, the rise of automation. The artists weren’t escaping reality. They were trying to redesign it.

The exhibition draws a deliberate symmetry between the 1920s and today, suggesting that periods of rapid transformation can also generate new forms of resilience and imagination.  In real estate, we feel that symmetry acutely. The way people want to live has shifted faster in the past five years than in the previous fifty. Density, privacy, green space, walkability, community — buyers are weighing these things differently than they were even before the pandemic. And the properties that will hold their value are the ones that respond to those new priorities, not the ones that were designed for a world that no longer exists.

Why It’s Worth Your Time

I’m not suggesting every agent needs an art museum habit. But there’s something genuinely useful about stepping back and asking the same question these artists were asking: what do people actually need from the place they live? Not what sold well last year. Not what the comps support. What do people need?

One of the architects behind the new building put it simply: “Museums are no longer just spaces for art. They are spaces for people. In many ways, they are among the last truly public spaces in the city.”  The same is true of a well-designed home, or a thoughtfully positioned listing. The best spaces are the ones built around how people actually want to live, and right now, that’s a question worth sitting with.