"SMALL SCALE, BIG CHANGE: New Architectures of Social Engagement"

The show, which looks at 11 projects around the world that have had major social impacts despite modest budgets and sizes, is a rebuttal to the familiar complaint that the profession is too focused on aesthetic experimentation and not enough on the lives of ordinary people.

The juxtaposition of the two images — one in an obscure African village, the other less than mile from Los Angeles’s cultural acropolis — underscore one of the show’s central themes: that architecture’s potential as an agent of social healing is not restricted to the developing world.