MOS Wins MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program

(MOS)

The architectural firm MOS (pronounced “moss,” but not to be confused with the design emporium) is the winner of the the 2009 Museum of Modern Art/P.S.1 Young Architects Program, the museums announced today. Now in its tenth year, the program gives emerging architectural talents the opportunity to design and present innovative projects. Past winners include nARCHITECTS, Xefirotarch, and WORKac.

Cambridge- and New Haven-based MOS triumphed over five other finalists that were invited to present an urban landscape for the large courtyard entrance of P.S.1. With a project budget of $70,000, the architects were required to incorporate elements of shade, water, seating, and bar areas into a proposed project. MOS’s winning landscape, “afterparty” (pictured above, in model form), will be on view in P.S.1′s outdoor courtyard starting in June, and will be the venue for the museum’s Warm Up summer music series. Read on for how MOS’s climate-altering design will help cool down Warm Up.

So what’s so great about “afterparty”? “It consists of a lightweight aluminum frame of recyclable parts clad in a weave, allowing some light and air to circulate but at the same time shading visitors from the sunlight,” explains Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. “Its combination of forms includes tall, chimney-like shapes, heroic cones, and others that are evocative at once of the vernacular village structures world-wide and of the open ruined vaults of the Roman Forum.” He had us at “heroic cones.”

MOS architects Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith describe their structure as “a temporary urban shelter and passive cooling station” that forms “a network of large, medium, and small cellular spaces that allow for intimacy and social formations to thrive.” Cool air from the thermal mass of the P.S.1 courtyard’s shaded concrete walls and concrete water troughs in the center of the structure will be drawn up through a series of cooling chimneys by induction. Voila: instant breeze.

The other finalists, nominated from a pool of 40 candidates by experts in the field, were !ndie architecture, Bade Stageberg Cox, L.E.FT architects, and PARA-project. An exhibition of their proposed projects will be on view at MoMA this summer.

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