by Michael Valinsky
Every year, MoMA PS1 presents Warm Up – an outdoor music series that takes place on Saturdays throughout the summer. It’s an ideal summer location for outdoor music, where DJs, musicians, sound artists, and visual artists from all over the globe come together for a casual, weekend celebration.
The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 jointly present the Annual Young Architects Program. This allows emerging architects the possibility of creating a work particularly made for MoMA PS1’s facility in Long Island City. The winner of this design competition is immediately chosen to contribute a temporary urban landscape that will find a home in the outdoor space where the music series is held. This year, The Living won the prize and will create their piece, Hy-Fi.
David Benjamin, head of the Living proposed a heaped circular tower made entirely from natural materials – the idea is to create bio-bricks from corn stalks and mushrooms, and use them to build a tower. In a collaborative effort with Evocative, a material science company developing a new class of home-compostable bioplastics, The Living will use the bio-bricks as the base for their towers. Made of a 100% recyclable, mass-branching fungus called mycelium, the compositional materials are grown from and combined with plant waste to construct the massive hyper-modern structure.
At the top, reflexive bricks will be put in place and produced through a custom-made daylighting mirror film invented by 3M. As a result, the light is thrown towards the bottom of the tower, allowing for an unprecedented visual effect. The installation as a whole will look like a beaming orb from afar. Moreover, its shape and design will allow for a natural ventilation system, fed by the gaps in the brickwork. This creates a gravity-defying micro-climate where the bottom is light and porous and the top thick and dense. The ground level will therefore receive cool air while the heat will travel up top. This will come as a great relief for the overheated audience members in the middle of the New York summer.
But the greatest thing about this piece is that, as curator Pedro Gadanho said: “This year’s YAP winning project bears no small feat. It is the first sizeable structure to claim near-zero carbon emissions in its construction process and, beyond recycling, it presents itself as being 100 percent compostable.” In that sense, the piece grows out of nothing but earth and will return to nothing but earth once the series is over, a first in Warm Up’s 15-year timeline.
So make sure not to miss this year’s Warm Up—it looks like this installation will set the groundwork for innovative, environmentally-friendly works of art. Maybe David Benjamin has even planted a seed in the minds of all urban planners in New York City: a cityscape made of compostable materials.
For more information on PS1’s and its programming, check: http://momaps1.org/warmup/ or follow on Twitter @MoMAPS1.
[…] Full article here […]