MoMA and P.S.1 Announce Young Architect Winner

The urban landscape for P.S.1's courtyard recalls a flying carpet preparing to land.

Mairi Beautyman -- Interior Design, 2/13/2008

Work Architecture Company is the winner of the prestigious ninth annual MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program, organized by New York museums the Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. The New York-based architecture firm, selected from a group of five finalists in a closed nomination process, will create a sustainable urban landscape for the entrance courtyard to P.S.1.

Recalling a flying carpet gearing to land, Work Architecture Company's PF1 (Public Farm One) will open on June 26, kicking of the museum's Warm Up summer music series. The recyclable installation is conceived as a working farm, and constructed of large cardboard tubes. It will incorporate sound effects, shade, water, seating, and bar areas. Vegetables and plants will surround interactive elements such as swings, fans, and a pool. The museum has allotted a $70,000 budget for the project.

The four other finalists are Matter Architecture Practice (New York), MONAD Architects (Miami), SU11 Architecture + Design (New York), and THEM/Lynch+Crembil (New York). From July 15-October 20 MoMA will present an exhibition on the designs.

“Thirty years after Rem Koolhaas's published Delirious New York, the influential manifesto which celebrated the often unlikely and hybrid mixture of functions in the city's huge buildings and dense districts, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of WORK Architecture Company bring us the improbable merger of a flying carpet and a farmer's market, a cultivated and cultivatable piece of infrastructure that is a timely comment on issues from post-industrialization to sustainability," says Barry Bergdoll, MoMA's Philip Johnson chief curator of architecture and design.

Renderings courtesy of Work Architecture Company.