MoMA and P.S.1 Announce the 2010 Winner of the Young Architects Program

Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu of Brooklyn won with its "Pole Dance" concept.

Sheila Kim -- Interior Design, 1/23/2010 11:35:00 AM

Its evolution included a colorful circus tent–like landscape, an urban farm with live chickens, and a composition of fuzzy chimneys, among others. For 2010, the courtyard of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York, will resemble something between a beach party and a video game. P.S.1 and the Museum of Modern Art announced the winner of the 11th annual Young Architects Program: Brooklyn, New York–based Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO – IL). The institutions once again invited five finalists to design a temporary urban landscape in P.S.1’s courtyard for a budget of $85,000, while focusing on reuse, recycling, and sustainability. 



The winner—who beat out Bjarke Ingels Group, Easton + Combs, Freecell, and William O’Brien Jr.—conceived of “Pole Dance.” The proposal promises museum visitors and partygoers of the center’s Warm-Up concert series a fun, interactive environment composed of 25-foot-tall poles and bungee-cord grids. With human activation via such features as hammocks and pulls, as well as environmental ones such as rain-collecting plants, the interconnected system’s equilibrium will shift to create a steady ripple throughout the courtyard. Meanwhile, a net covering the entire installation will stabilize the pole movement. Multicolored balls resting atop the net will provide spots of shade and lend to the beach party feel, as will a small pool and sandpit.



“With simple materials and elegant engineering, the P.S.1 courtyard is converted into an occupiable game and social zone with many of the markers of the virtual world realized in elements that partake of the traditional playground or gym,” says Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s chief curator of the Department of Architecture and Design. “Here the net is literal and physical, the space tangible, the encounters unprogrammable. Yet the system is dynamic and interactive, and all the materials can be reused and redeployed.”

The opening date for “Pole Dance” is to be announced; all five finalists of the Young Architects Program for 2010 will be featured in an exhibit at MoMA this summer.

Renderings courtesy of MoMA/P.S.1.