Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes,” is an exhibition examining the art and architecture of the suburb as a catalyst for new art organized by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in association with the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. It was made possible by generous support from John Taft.

The American suburbs have been extolled as a middle-class utopia and reviled as a dystopic world of homogeneity and conformity, note the exhibition’s organizers. “Challenging preconceived ideas and expectations about suburbia (either pro or con), ‘Worlds Away’ hopes to impart a better understanding of how those ideas were formed and how they are challenged by contemporary realities,” exhibition curators state.

The exhibition is arranged according to the three “r’s” of the American suburb: residential homes, retail developments, and roads.

The Residential section of the show looks at how the detached single-family tract home as a symbol of the two-parent nuclear family is belied by a new reality: In 2000, the number of suburban households composed of young singles and older people living alone exceeded that of two-generational families living under one roof. Architectural works for this section focus on this shifting demographic composition of suburban households. The ethnic diversity of the “new” suburbs is captured in the photographic montages of people and places by Minneapolis-based photographer Laura Migliorino. Depicting the Southern California-based adult entertainment industry that thrives in suburban home film sets, Larry Sultan’s series The Valley lifts the veil on bucolic suburban life.

The Retail component of the show looks at the three most common commercial developments in suburban America: the shopping strip, the mall, and the big box store. The ubiquitous shopping strip of post-War suburbia was a byproduct of zoning codes that encouraged businesses to cluster along busy thoroughfares, many of them evolving from small town main streets and business districts. Fostered by financial incentives such as favorable tax codes, shopping strips began accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s evolving into fully enclosed climate-controlled environments and carefully planned circulation routes. The widespread introduction of “big box” stores soon followed. In the 1990s a new category, the mega mall—epitomized by the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota—was an inevitable extension of the growing scale of retail business.

The tremendous growth of newer and larger shopping malls has led to the proliferation of abandoned and dying malls—so-called “grayfields.” The exhibition spotlights an array of creative strategies to adapt and reuse these sites. Artist Julia Christensen has been documenting the conversion of former big box stores to alternative uses, ranging from flea markets to churches to the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota. Artist Stefanie Nagorka converts a Home Depot into a studio and gallery by creating sculptures in the store aisles from parts found on its warehouse shelves. LTL Architects’ “New Suburbanism” (2000/2004) combines a big box store with living and recreational spaces above.

It is impossible to conceive of suburbia without the network of transportation systems and the automobile culture it promotes. While the road has been a persistent symbol of escape and freedom, as a circulation system for suburban life the road takes on a different meaning. Artists such as Catherine Opie have documented the beauty of the Los Angeles freeway system itself, while others such as Andrew Bush have used the roadway to capture portraits of passing drivers.

Several design firms are producing new works for the exhibition. Estudio Teddy Cruz explores the reciprocal influence of American suburbanization and Latin American immigration on suburban San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico; FAT (Fashion.Architecture.Taste) presents its work on a multiethnic suburban park in the Netherlands; Lateral Architecture explores the spaces between and around big box power centers, the successor to suburbia’s regional mall; Interboro examines life at a so-called “dead mall” in New York; Minneapolis-based Coen+Partners revises a traditional cul-de-sac development; the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) documents the major automotive test tracks located in various urban peripheries of the United States; and Jeffrey Inaba of INABA/C-Lab recasts the humble suburban trash container and the society of consumption and waste it represents.