Summer Fun at P.S.I - P.S.I. Contemporary Art Center - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 2000 by Stephanie Cash

The increasingly popular Warm-up series, which features DJs, dancing and beer from the local Brooklyn Brewery, kicks off on Sunday, July 2, in the courtyard of P.S. 1 and will continue every Saturday from 4 to 9 PM through Sept 2. This, the event's third year, also launches five annual competitions--called the Young Architects Program--for emerging architects to design the courtyard installation. Following the merger of P.S. 1 and the Museum of Modern Art last year, Philip Johnson was commissioned to design a dance pavilion.

This year, the New York-based firm SHoP/Sharples Holden Pasquarelli was chosen from three finalists. The selection, like the ongoing competition, seems more in keeping with the cutting-edge spirit of P.S. 1 and is something of a return to the first Warm-up courtyard installation in 1998, which included a sauna, a large inflatable pool and a sun bathing platform by the Austrian artist collaborative Gelatin.

SHoP's proposal calls for a single wood-and-plastic structure incorporating beach and surf themes. The surface provides shade, seating, cabanas for changing clothing, and platforms for dancing. Relief from hot summer afternoons is provided by sprayed mist as well as by water that runs along the surface and collects in wading pools at the structure's lowest points.

Twenty nominees--students, recent graduates and established experimental architects--were selected by architecture.school deans and architecture-magazine editors. The other two finalists were Taeg Nishimoto and the team LOT/EK. Each finalist received $1,000. A show of all the project sketches, models and computer renderings is on view at P.S. 1 this summer.