LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- Hide & Seek by Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers of Dream The Combine, in collaboration with Clayton Binkley of Arup, is on view in
MoMA PS1’s courtyard from June 28 through September 3, 2018. Winner of The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1’s annual Young Architects Program, this year’s construction is a responsive, kinetic environment that features eight intersecting elements arrayed across the entirety of the MoMA PS1 courtyard. Hide & Seek serves as a temporary urban landscape for the 21st season of Warm Up, MoMA PS1’s pioneering outdoor music series.
Now in its 19th edition, the Young Architects Program at The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 has offered emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design and present innovative projects, challenging each year’s winners to develop creative designs for a temporary outdoor installation that provides shade, seating, and water. The architects must also work within guidelines that address environmental issues.
Inspired by the crowd, the street, and the jostle of relationships found in the contemporary city, Hide & Seek enables surprising connections throughout the adjoining courtyards of MoMA PS1 and the surrounding streets. Each of the horizontal structures contains two inward-facing, gimbaled mirrors suspended from a frame. The mirrors move in the wind or with human touch, permitting dislocating views and unique spatial relationships across the space that foster unexpected interactions. As the vanishing points disappear into the depths of the mirrors, the illusion of space expands beyond the physical boundaries of the Museum and bends into new forms, creating visual connections within the courtyard and onto the streets outside. In reference to these unpredictable gestures, the upper registers of the steel structure are filled with a cloud of mist and light, responding to the activity and life of Warm Up at night. Scriptive elements, including a runway and a large-scale hammock, invite visitors into performance and establish platforms for improvisation.
“For the 19th year of the Young Architects Program, Dream The Combine’s provocative intervention Hide & Seek tests the effects of rapid development in Long Island City, Queens and, more broadly, the American city. Conceived as a temporary site of exchange, the proposal activates the MoMA PS1 courtyard as a speculative frontier to be magnified, transgressed, and re-occupied,” said Sean Anderson, Associate Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. “As art can and should move through walls, so too does Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers’s restaging of how and why communities interact with the Museum. The materials deployed will not just be its reflective ‘runway,’ illuminated overhead misting networks, or even an expansive hammock for lounging, but a scaled system that addresses multiple publics with the impassioned assertion, ‘You Are Here.’”
Klaus Biesenbach, MoMA PS1 Director and MoMA Chief Curator at Large adds, "in recent years, Long Island City has become more vertical. With this project, MoMA PS1 will engage horizontally, inviting the neighborhood and our diverse audience to participate in and engage with our programs at eye level. Dream The Combine’s proposal addresses this in both form and content, with participatory architecture to reflect, if not to literally mirror, the here and now in Long Island City and the country as a whole.”
The other finalists for this year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program were LeCavalier R+D (Jesse LeCavalier), FreelandBuck (David Freeland and Brennan Buck), OFICINAA (Silvia Benedito and Axel Häusler), and BairBalliet (Kelly Bair and Kristy Balliet). An exhibition of the five finalists' proposed projects is on view at The Museum of Modern Art through September 3, organized by Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, with Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.
Dream The Combine is the creative practice of artists and architects Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers, based in Minneapolis, MN. Working with engineer Clayton Binkley and a trusted group of fabricators, Dream The Combine investigate the conceptual overlaps in art, architecture, and cultural theory through structures that disrupt assumed dichotomies and manipulate the boundary between real and illusory space.
Jennifer Newsom received her Bachelor of Arts from Yale College and her Master of Architecture from Yale University, where she also received the Fermin Ennis Memorial Fellowship and the Anne C.K. Garland award for academic achievement. While at Yale, she organized the two-day symposium Black Boxes: Enigmas of Space and Race held at Yale School of Architecture. Recently appointed an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Architecture, she teaches undergraduate and graduate architectural design studios. Using race as a provocative impetus for her work, she is concerned with surface perceptions and the structures that support those readings. She is a licensed architect and has worked with firms as diverse as Adjaye Associates, Deborah Berke Partners, Robert A.M. Stern Architects, and Cooper Robertson. Her writing has been featured in Metropolis magazine and Africana: The Encyclopedia of African and African-American Experience.
Tom Carruthers received his Bachelor of Arts in drawing and sculpture from Brown University and his Master of Architecture from Yale University. His early work consists of site-specific sculptures that explore landscape as metaphor and image as space. For four years, he was lead assistant for artist Ursula von Rydingsvard, helping with the construction of over 20 large scale sculptural works. As a licensed architect, he worked alongside the late Charles Gwathmey and at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, developing early concept proposals with formal strategies that integrate context, complex geometry, and material construction. In addition to his creative practice, Tom is co-owner of Jacobsson Carruthers, a metal fabrication shop in Minneapolis.
Clayton Binkley is a structural engineer with Arup working across project scales and typologies. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Sculpture from Yale University and his MEng from University of Bath. Bringing a multi-disciplinary design sensibility to the work, he has collaborated with Jennifer and Tom since the inception of their practice. His work reflects his belief that high quality, holistic design can be achieved through creative engineering and collaboration.
