MoMA: The Latest Architecture and News

ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the Young Architects Program (YAP) MAXXI 2012 in late February. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against UNIRE/UNITE. NAMI, which means “wave” in Japanese, is a project that reflects contemporaneity, aims to send a message about the importance of harmony, and to create a bridge between people and cultures. This proposal, designed by VeryVery Architecture Office, is very simple and essential: an airy space provided with shadow, movable sitting benches, and a space that can accommodate different types of events and activities. Imbued with an experimental spirit and a strong attention to sustainability, NAMI offers a chance to express the social and cultural values requested by the Young Architecture Program.

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ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the 2012 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) in February. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against HWKN’s Wendy. Cameron Wu(Cambridge, MA) proposed Coney Inland, an architectural strategy which formally unifies and spatially modulates the challenging MoMA PS1 courtyard site. A series of developable surfaces (cones and cylinders) and their base structures normalize the contingencies of scale and shape of the three courtyard spaces, while their legible transformations register the idiosyncratic nature of the overall site geometry.

For generations of New Yorkers, Coney Island has served as the quintessential local retreat from the city. Unfettered access to sky, land, and sea makes it a clear contrast to the urban metropolis, drawing crowds in search of spatial and social release. Through the architectural translation of qualities inherent to this ocean-side precedent, Coney Inland imports the culture of casual beach leisure into the courtyard at MoMA PS1.

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The program promoting and supporting young architecture organized by MAXXI Architettura together with MoMA/MoMA PS1 in New York and CONSTRUCTO of Santiago in Chile has announced UNIRE/UNITE by Urban Movement Design as winner of the 2012 Young Architects Program (YAP) MAXXI in Rome. Following MAXXI’s first successful summer installation named WHATAMI by stARTT, Urban Movement Design now has the opportunity to reinvent the MAXXI piazza with an interactive installation featuring a long and sinuous band of wood and grass that encourages a playful bond between the building and its users. This proposal was selected over four other shortlisted contestants who where chosen by an Italian jury.

Both UNIRE/UNITE by Urban Movement Design and WENDY by HWKN (HollwichKushner) will be inaugurated in the MAXXI piazza and the courtyard at MoMA PSI in June 2012, along with an exhibit showcasing the fifteen design proposals from the finalists.

Continue reading for more information on this years MAXXI winner, UNIRE/UNITE.

ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the 2012 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) earlier this month. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against HWKN’s Wendy. Ibañez Kim Studio (Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim) proposed a Mechanical Garden that enjoyed a unique partnership with artists and engineers in Philadelphia.

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ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the 2012 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) earlier this month. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against HWKN’s Wendy. Virtual Water, a collaborative design brought to you by UrbanLab, endrestudio and Method Design, formally manifests what is hidden in plain sight: RAIN. The project reveals and plays with thousands of gallons of summertime rainwater that would otherwise be discarded from the PS1 courtyard.

Virtual Water refers to water hidden in everyday products. A pair of jeans, for example, has a 3000 gallon Virtual Water footprint because 3000 gallons of water are consumed in the various steps of its production chain (growing the cotton, dyeing the fabric, etc).

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Last September, we attended MoMA’s PS 1 Open Studio event to catch a glimpse of the collaborative projects of five multidisciplinary teams focusing on how to re-think, re-organize and re-energize the concept of an American suburb in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. When we visited, the teams were in the final stages of their designs and preparing to send their visions to the Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. One of the team’s we talked with was WORK Architecture Company about their Nature-City proposal, an extension of the suburb whichhas been designed in an abstracted way to serve as a plug in model to create cities elsewhere.

More about Nature-City after the break.

Starting today, through July 30, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will be running an exhibit featuring the proposals of five interdisciplinary studios that were asked to re-think and re-invent the future of housing in the midst of the foreclosure crisis that remains a threat to many Americans and their homes. Over the Summer of 2011, WORKac, MOS Architects, Visible Weather, Zago Architecture and Studio Gang Architects selected five “megaregions” across the country on which to speculate the form that housing could take: physically, socially and economically. Late this summer, ArchDaily has provided coverage while the work was in progress. Opening today, the results of those speculative efforts will be presented at the MoMA as part of an exhibit called Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. The Open Studios exercise was organized by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, with Reinhold Martin, Director of Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

Read on for more on the proposals and details about the exhibit.

An extended view of Water Cathedral, the selected project by GUN Arq for the 2011 YaP installation in Santiago, Chile, shot by photographer Cristobal Palma.

The Water Cathedral is a large, horizontal urban nave for public use. The structure is made up of numerous slender, vertical components, which hang or rise like stalactites and stalagmites in a cave, varying in height and concentration. The project incorporates water dripping at different pulses and speeds from these hanging elements, fed by a hydraulic irrigation network. When filled with small amounts of water, the stalactite components act as interfaces out of which water droplets gradually flow and cool visitors below. The stalagmites topography provides elements of shade, along with plants and water that collect under the Water Cathedral’s canopy.

Last week, the MoMA and the PS1 announced HWKN as the winner for the 2012 YAP in NY.

More videos by Cristobal Palma at ArchDaily:

Earlier we brought to you WORKac‘s preliminary scheme for the transformation of Salem-Keizer, Oregon. We would now like to present the final scheme presented by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood. The project integrates elements of the city and nature across an existing 200 acre big box retail site. WORKac is one of five interdisciplinary teams participating in “MoMA’s Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream.” Each team is challenged to re-imagine struggling American cities and suburbs, seeing the current economic crisis as an opportunity to evolve.

Jeanne Gang presents Studio Gang’s vision for the transformation of Cicero, Illinois, a 1920’s suburb that suffered greatly from the foreclosure crisis. Studio Gang is one of five interdisciplinary teams participating in “MoMA’s Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream.” Each team is challenged to re-imagine struggling American cities and suburbs, seeing the current economic crisis as an opportunity to evolve.

The space of sound created by Carlito Carvalhosa’s Sum of Days on exhibit at MoMA until November 14, 2011 is a sublime environment of billowing white fabric and the white noise of the atrium reflected upon itself. The psuedo-boundaries established by the translucent material that hang from the ceiling create a confined space of light and ambient sound – fleeting and ephemeral. Upon entering the exhibit, you pass an array of speakers affixed to the wall. They are emitting a low hum – the sound of voices and echoes that are distant, yet recognizable. It is unclear at first from where these sounds are originating, but behind the fabric bodies are drifting in and out of view. The curtains, which are constantly swaying, direct you in an ellipse to the center of the space where a single microphone hangs, picking up the noise within the exhibit and sending them to the dozens of speakers that hang at intervals inside the curtains, along the walls of the exhibit, and up through the galleries at the mezzanine levels that overlook the atrium.

NEW YORK–Although the American Folk Art Museum has avoided dissolution thanks to a cash infusion from trustees and the Ford Foundation, the institution’s ongoing financial troubles raise difficult questions about the relationship between signature architecture and cultural capital.

This weekend, we had the opportunity to attend the Open Studio event at MoMA’s PS1. As we mentioned earlier, this project posed the daunting question of how to re-think, re-organize and re-energize the concept of an American suburb in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. As MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll explains, “Projects will aim to challenge cultural assumptions concerning home ownership and associated settlement patterns, such as suburban sprawl, and assist the public in contemplating a potentially different future for housing and cities. The workshop and exhibition are premised on reframing the current crisis as an opportunity, an approach that is in keeping with the fundamental American ethos where challenging circumstances engender innovation and out-of-the-box thinking. It is our hope that new paradigms of architecture and regional and transportation planning become the silver lining in the crisis of home ownership.” The five multidisciplinary teams chose five different American suburbs to explore, and this Saturday, we jumped from Oregon to Florida, to Illinois, to California and New Jersey, to observe their five quite different solutions.

Check out our preview of the teams’ work-in-progress projects which will be exhibited at the MoMA this February.

In the wake of Hurricane Irene it only seemed appropriate to take a second look at Rising Current, an exhibit that was featured at the MoMA just last year. To give you a refresher, the exhibit was a cohesive showcase of five projects tackling the lingering truth that within a few years, the waterfront of the New York harbor will drastically change.

Team Zero, comprised of ARO and dlandstudio, specifically took a look at the lower Manhattan landscape, proposing to develop a new soft and hard infrastructure solution paved with a mesh of cast concrete and engineered soil and salt tolerant plants. This would create greenways that act as absorptive sponges for rainwater. The porous green streets address daily tidal flows and storm surges with 3 interrelated high performance systems (network of parks, wetlands and tidal salt marshes). These systems stop sewage overflow, block higher sea levels and mitigate storm surge.

Rising Current provided an emphasis on how to re-think the city, relevant before, and even more pressing now after the flooding from the hurricane. Let’s hope that the ideas for solutions that were generated from the exhibit can now be considered for implementation. More about Rising Currents and Team Zero’s solution following the break.

The community based winning design for the 2011 Young Architects Program at the P.S.1, “Holding Pattern” by Interboro Partners, shared photographs of the installations canopy raising which took place last Thursday at MoMA. The New York firm, formed by Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca, and Georgeen Theodore, were able to creatively accomplish the design within the Young Architects Program’s budget and program requirements, stretching the funds to essentially serve two purposes; as the materials will be recycled, donating the objects such as ping pong tables, benches, and flood lights, to the community at the end of the installation. ”Holding Pattern” will welcome visitors beginning June 19th.

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Currently on view at the MoMa, the Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement exhibition has provided an exciting and successful glimpse into how architecture can serve the greater needs of society. The museum just shared with us their latest news that starting in November and running through May, the Philip Johnson Architecture and Design Galleries will hosting Building Collections: Recent Acquisitions of Architecture. This exhibit will highlight the great variety of important acquisitions made by the Department of Architecture and Design since 2005, juxtaposing, in several cases, newly acquired material with works long held in the collection in order to underscore the rationale and motives behind collecting architecture at MoMA. Some of the featured pieces include models by Corbusier and sketches by Sullivan.

More about the exhibition, including images of some of the acquired pieces after the break.

New York’s MoMA will be featuring a new exhibition that focuses on architects’ social responsibility. The exhibition, entitled Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement, which will open at the beginning of October and run through January, will showcase 11 projects on five continents that “respond to localized needs in under-served communities.” These pragmatic solutions demonstrate how architecture can serve the greater needs of society. From a handmade school in Bangladesh, to a cable car that connects a single hillside barrio in Caracas to the city, these realized projects are infused with passion and a strong drive to uplift society through architecture. “Together, these undertakings not only offer practical solutions to known needs, but also aim to have a broader effect on the communities in which they work, using design as a tool,” explained the MoMA.

A list of the projects that will be included in the exhibition after the break.

Organized by MoMA and PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, the Rising Currents exhibit cannot be missed by architects, ecologists, or green enthusiasts…let alone any New Yorker. The exhibit is a cohesive showcase of five projects which tackle the lingering truth that within a few years, the waterfront of the New York harbor will drastically change. Dealing with large scale issues of climate change, the architects delve into a specific scale that we can recognize and relate to. The projects are not meant to be viewed as a master plan, but rather each individual zone serves as a test site for the team to experiment. The projects demonstrate the architects’ abilities to look passed the idea of climate change as a problem, and move on to see the opportunities it presents. Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, explained, “Your mission is to come up with images that are so compelling they can’t be forgotten and so realistic that they can’t be dismissed.”

More about each zone after the break.