Since 2000, the MoMA and the P.S.1 have been running a competition under their Young Architects Program, inviting each year a group of emerging architects to experiment with new shapes and materials, resulting in a summer installation at the P.S.1.
Interesting projects have come out of this competition, such as the Public Farm (PF1) by Work AC in 2008, and Afterparty by MOS last year. And today, the winning proposal for 2010 has been announced: Pole Dance by Brooklyn based SO-IL (Solid Objectives Idenburg Liu) a practice ran by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu.
Conceived as a participatory environment that reframes the conceptual relationship between humankind and structure, Pole Dance is an interconnected system of poles and bungees whose equilibrium is open to human action and environmental factors. Throughout the courtyard, groups of 25-foot-tall poles on 12 x 12-foot grids connected by bungee cords whose elasticity will cause the poles to gently sway, creating a steady ripple throughout the courtyard space.
To explain this to one of my friends, I used a fabric and a few sharp pencils (so they stick to the fabric, and the eraser in the back sticks to the table) and we started to move it around… I´m pretty sure that the built installation will be very fun to visit. As you can see on the renderings, the net waves around, and touches the soil at the pool in the center, with a few holes that let you pass by.
SO-IL worked with Buro Happold for this structure, and with Sciame for cost analysis, to keep the installation on a $85,000 budget.
After the break, more images and a video from SO-IL’s winning proposal.
