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A Museum Courtyard Will Be Taken Over by a Colorful Web

“Weaving the Courtyard” will bring a kaleidoscopic of color to MoMA PS1

Erin Blakemore

Correspondent

February 5, 2016

The web will be woven over the courtyard of MoMA's PS1 in Queens. MoMA/Escobedo Solíz Studio

An artist's rendering of "Weaving the Courtyard," this year's MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program winner. MoMA/Escobedo Solíz Studio

The woven courtyard will feature wading pools and a colorful kaleidoscope of ropes. MoMA/Escobedo Solíz Studio

The ropes will make use of the existing holes in the PS1 courtyard and be reused after the installation comes down. MoMA/Escobedo Solíz Studio

For a courtyard in Long Island City, Queens, the need for shade provides an opportunity to push the limits of up-and-coming designers through the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1’s annual collaboration, the Young Architects Program. The program, now in its 17th year, gives young architects the chance to design a temporary outdoor installation for the museum’s PS1 outpost in Queens. It recently announced this year's winning design, which will encase the entire museum's courtyard in a colorful web of ropes.

The kaleidoscopic framework, called "Weaving the Courtyard," is the brainchild of Escobedo Solíz Studio, the Mexican architecture practice of Lazbent Escobedo and Andres Solíz. The young designers specialize in environmentally friendly and solutions-based architecture that, in their words, “belongs to its place.”

In this case, that means a wild web of colorful ropes suspended over the PS1 courtyard to provide both shade and artistic ambiance. Ropes will be threaded through pre-existing holes in the current buildings, creating what the architects call “both sky and landscape” in a release. To top it all off, there will be a reflective wading pool for visitors (a feature Hyperallergic’s Carey Dunne speculates will function more like a kiddie pool for the “sweaty drunk hordes” who attend the museum’s summertime Warm Up events). The ropes will be taken down and reused at the end of the installation.

“Weaving the Courtyard," is just the latest of many innovative and surreal landscapes created by the museum’s competition winners. Over the years, architects have filled the courtyard with everything from gigantic bouncy balls and hammocks to a stylized beach to a huge stained glass flower. For the design-minded folks, summer can’t come soon enough.