Hasta La Ideas

The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 are pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Young Architects Program (YAP), an annual call for proposals for a temporary outdoor installation for the converted schoolyard space in Long Island City. In keeping with the institution’s mission to support contemporary art, architecture and design practice, the entries invariably err on the side of experimental even as they meet a brief to 1.) provide shade, seating and water, and 2.) address environmental issues, including sustainability and recycling. New Yorkers and well-heeled visitors alike have probably encountered one of these structures during MoMA PS1’s weekly Warm-Up summer concert series, when these spectacular projects serve to elevate the courtyard (literally, at times) from a humble outdoor venue to a visionary social space.

The winner of the 15th YAP is The Living, an architectural practice led by principal David Benjamin, whose “Hy-Fi” is billed as a “100% organic” structure. Designed using “biological technologies combined with cutting-edge computation and engineering,” the ambitious eco-edifice comes in at roughly three stories tall, with its lower portions constructed from organic bricks developed in conjunction with bio-material specialists Ecovative. Its upper extremities are made from hollow reflective bricks—”produced through the custom-forming of a new daylighting mirror film”—by 3M, which will first be used as the “growing trays” for the corn+’shroom bricks.

The organic bricks are arranged at the bottom of the structure and the reflective bricks are arranged at the top to bounce light down on the towers and the ground. The structure inverts the logic of load-bearing brick construction and creates a gravity-defying effect—instead of being thick and dense at the bottom, it is thin and porous at the bottom.

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