For the first time, MoMA PS1 and MAXXI partner on the first international edition of the Young Architects Program (YAP), offering emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design and present innovative projects. This year's program winners are Interboro Partners of Brooklyn and stARTT of Rome.
The 12th-annual YAP program challenges designers to develop highly innovative designs for a temporary, outdoor installation at MoMA PS1 that provides shade, seating, and water. The architects must also work within guidelines that address environmental issues, including sustainability and recycling.
Interboro Partners will design a temporary urban landscape for the 2011 Warm Up summer music series in MoMA PS1’s outdoor courtyard. The installation, Holding Pattern, brings an eclectic collection of objects including benches, mirrors, ping-pong tables, and floodlights—all disposed under a canopy of rope strung from MoMA PS1’s wall to the parapet across the courtyard. The design incorporates for the first time the entire space of MoMA PS1’s courtyard under a single grand structure, while creating an environment focusing on the audience as much as the Warm Up performance.
A key component of the theme is recycling; objects in the space will be donated to the community at the conclusion of the summer. The designers met with local businesses and organizations including a taxi cab company, senior and day care centers, high schools, settlement houses, the local YMCA, library, and a greenmarket to determine what components of their installation could be used by those organizations following the Warm Up summer music series. Incorporating objects that can subsequently be used by these organizations is a means of strengthening MoMA PS1’s ties to the local Long Island City community.
“Simple materials that transform a space to create a kind of public living room and rec room are trademarks of this young Brooklyn firm. Interboro is interested in creating elegant and unpretentious spaces with common materials. Their work has both a modesty and a commitment quite at odds with the luxury and complex computer-generated form that has prevailed in the city in recent years. With a few gestures they transform parts of the city to achieve new temporary atmospheres and attract new participants," said Barry Bergdoll, MoMA Philip Johnson Chief Curator.
stARTT will create an event space in the MAXXI piazza known as WHATAMI based on the manufacturing of an artificial archipelago-hill with smaller green areas in the garden and outside the museum. The hill works as a garden, injecting “green” into the concrete plateau of the museum’s outdoor space, allowing it to serve as a stage and/or parterre for concerts and other events, or as a space to rest and look at the museum itself. The artificial landscape will be punctuated by large “flowers” providing light, shadow, water, and sound. The materials proposed for the installation involve a two-fold recycling process, the supplying of the materials for the construction (straw, geo-textile, plastic) and the dismantling of the “hill” (turf, lighting).
The other MoMA finalists included FormlessFinder, MASS Design Group, Matter Architecture Practice, and IJP. YAP_MAXXI finalists included Raffaella De Simone/Valentina Mandalari; Ghigos Ideas; Asif Khan; and Langarita Navarro Arquitectos. All proposed projects will be on view at MoMA over the summer.
“We’re very happy with the results of this program for three main reasons. First, the collaboration with MoMA proved as effective and productive as we hoped, finally allowing us a surprising insight into the most recent research in terms of architecture, public space, and landscape. Second, we were able to discover an unexpected positive quality of answers by the Italian and European young (under 35) architects involved in the project, all proposing fascinating, innovative and well developed proposals. Third, we’re delighted that we were able to choose a winning proposal which incorporates a MAXXI_specific approach to the issues of ecology, recycle, and public space,” said Pippo Ciorra, Senior Curator of Architecture at MAXXI.
A dedicated website will be launched prior to the June openings featuring the selected proposals and designs, an archive of past MoMA/MoMA PS1 finalists’ and winners’ proposals, and interviews with the curators as well as installation videos.
