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Every summer, design geeks and art addicts trek to New York’s Long Island City for the weekly Warm Up music series at MoMA’s PS1 Contemporary Art Center. Cavorting in the former public school's concrete plaza, visitors are shaded from the elements by the winning design of the museum's Young Architects program. For its 10th season, Surface Avant Guardians Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of New Haven-based firm MOS presented Afterparty, a deceptively simple installation that Meredith describes as "having a Snuffleupagus or Chewbacca feel."   MORE >>

Every summer, design geeks and art addicts trek to New York's Long Island City for the weekly Warm Up music series at MoMA's PS1 Contemporary Art Center. Cavorting in the former public school’s concrete plaza, visitors are shaded from the elements by the winning design of the museum's Young Architects program. For its 10th season, Surface Avant Guardians Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of New Haven-based firm MOS presented Afterparty, a deceptively simple installation that Meredith describes as "having a Snuffleupagus or Chewbacca feel."
 
Using aluminum scaffolding pipe, the pair made a series of shelters using parametric modeling (where the same shape is distorted and repeated via computer). Those forms were then draped in an aluminum netting that filters light and heat, which in turn was topped with the fuzzy palm fibers of the Ijuk, a plant used for traditional roofing in Indonesia. This modern-meets-primitive design created a passive cooling effect. Only lightweight, foam benches and the museum's gravel courtyard remained underneath. "It showed a direction for architecture in general," says curator Andres Lepik, "less complicated design methods and more directness." Big Bird would approve, and so do we. ps1.org, mos-office.net   << LESS