Magical Urbanism, a website about urbanization, design and social change, is maintained by Mike Ernst. I'm an urban planner and designer based in San Francisco. I am a graduate of the Interboro’s Holding Pattern Installation
MoMA PS1′s Young Architects Program, an annual series of competitions that gives emerging architects the opportunity to build projects conceived for MoMA PS1′s facility in Long Island City, Queens. The objective of the program is to design an outdoor recreational area for summer visitors using the pre-existing space and affordable, available materials.
Interboro Partners created “Holding Pattern”, this year’s winning submission. It will be installed in MoMA PS1′s courtyard in Summer 2011.
From the project description:
“Holding Pattern” is the product of a sustained dialog with MoMA PS1′s courtyard and its neighbors. Instead of telling it what it should be, we patiently listened to what it and its neighbors had to say, then responded in kind. The result of this dialog is a scheme doesn’t so much redesign the courtyard as reveal it.
Time and circumstance had its way with MoMA PS1′s courtyard, which in an ideal world would be shaped like a rectangle but which is in reality an irregular seven-sided polygon.
But as the best baseball stadiums demonstrate, having to make do with less-than-ideal conditions can yield positive outcomes.
“Holding Pattern” reveals this situation by stringing ropes from holes in MoMA PS1′s concrete wall to the parapet across the courtyard. In the same way that Hugh Ferris reveals the potential of New York City’s 1916 zoning code by drawing the theoretical building envelope, we reveal the very odd, idiosyncratic space of the courtyard and simultaneously create an inexpensive and column-free space for the activity below. From the ground, the experience is of a soaring hyperboloid surface.
Link to the Interboro website via A Daily Dose of Architecture and archdaily.
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