Hy-Fi, an experimental, biodegradable pavilion designed by New York-based architectural firm The Living, has won MoMA PS1’s prestigiousYoung Architects Program competition this year, the museum announced on Wednesday. The structure, to be built this summer, will serve simultaneously as a high-visibility advertisement for its designers and the centerpiece of PS1’s outdoor Warm Up dance parties.
The firm’s name nods to its penchant for biotech-derived materials and its approach to urban spaces as living ecosystems — as does the design for the pavilion, which The Living says will be virtually carbon neutral. The structure, a tower comprised of cylindrical forms that split or merge at their bases and tops, will feature two new technologies that will be employed on an architectural scale for the first time ever at PS1. The bricks of its walls will be made from mushroom roots and discarded corn stalks processed, shaped, and dried into blocks by Ecovative, the Green Island, New York-based biomaterials lab that invented the process. The lower section will be the natural rust color of the bricks, in keeping with the colors of PS1’s brick walls. Higher up, the bricks will take on a luminous silver sheen, thanks to daylight-simulating mirror film, now in early development by 3M, that is designed to bounce light toward the ground (even after the sun goes down on the DJ sets).
“It combined two very important aspects for us,” said MoMA architecture curator Pedro Gadanho, who runs the Young Architects Program, speaking of the project. “Obviously, it operates as an exciting background for the party, but on the other hand, there’s the fact that it represents new ideas coming up in the architectural field. I think the way that they did this research on new materials in biotech is really exciting, and may represent a transformation for the construction industry.”
Hy-Fi has a relatively small physical footprint in relation to previous YAP winners, which should ease circulation at the Warm Up parties, which now attract about 5,000 guests. To keep them cool, the pavilion also includes a wading pool adjacent to the brick tower. But what about the squirting jets of water of designs past that would douse unsuspecting partygoers throughout the day? “Not this year,” Gadanho said.
The Living was founded in 2006 by GSAPP Living Architecture Lab director David Benjamin, who has in the past designed luminous floating water quality sensors for New York’s rivers, a lighted pavilion that texts pedestrians in Seoul, and a confidential project for Kanye West. The Living’s competition submission, along with those by its competitors — Collective-LOK, LAMAS, Pita + Bloom, and Fake Industries Architectural Agonism — will be on view at MoMA this summer in an exhibition organized by Gadanho and architecture department assistant Leah Barreras.
A version of this story originally appeared on Object Lessons.
