News

Arup assists 2018 Young Architects Program winners Dream The Combine

Scott Russell Principal, Americas West Leader,Los Angeles

2 July 2018

Arup assisted Dream The Combine’s vision through our structural engineering and lighting design services. Winners of the 2018 Young Architects Program, Minneapolis-based Dream The Combine’s project Hide & Seek brings several pavilions, stages, and movable mirrored walls together to create a “multiplicity of viewpoints.” The Young Architects Program, organised jointly by The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, challenges emerging architects to develop an innovative design for a temporary outdoor installation in the courtyard at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York.

Hide & Seek is a visually responsive, kinetic installation that shifts visitors’ perceptions of the space around them. Inspired by the crowd, the street, and the city, this intervention into the MoMA PS1 courtyard emphasises the dynamic nature of public space and encourages visitors to reconsider their relationships to it. This project is both platform and frame, and individuals are encouraged to interact with it and with one another through movement, embracing the chance encounter.

Features including a runway and a large communal hammock invite people to perform or simply relax. Eight intersecting steel volumes are arrayed across the courtyard in a way that facilitates community participation and engagement at different scales. Each spatial element contains two large gimbaled mirrors suspended from a butterfly-like frame standing at opposite ends. These mirrors move in the wind or when touched by visitors, multiplying views and unsettling conventional spatial relationships. Such visual currents act as a call-and-response between the occupants, blurring the authorship of movement and fixity of place. To further enhance this illusory effect, the upper registers of the steel structure are filled with mist and light that pulsates in response to summertime programming

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We always work with the inevitable elements of place: sun, wind, gravity, boundaries, and people. The installation is a dynamic, networked space for interaction and performance. ” Tom Carruthers Dream The Combine

The structural design

The interlocking network of voids forms an ambiguous structure. With sparse supports, the canopies appear to float — supported off one another to allow the shallow beams to span improbable distances. The large overhead structures appear to float above the courtyard and lightly hover over the exterior walls. This reinforces the illusion of an infinite void formed by the mirrors at opposing ends with the canopy tracing the lines of perspective in between.

As a key design element, the mirrors were a point of intense coordination amongst the design team. Through many iterations of structural support, the team came to an elegant design with framing that radiates from the pivoting support reinforcing the forced perspective of the voids. A universal joint, typically used in the drivetrain of cars, is repurposed allowing the large mirrors to swivel in all directions focusing all the energy of the object on a single delicate connection.

The lighting layout

The entire installation is constantly in flux due to sprung-mirrors and mist clouds interacting with the wind. Arup’s lighting team conducted daylighting studies to understand the reflections from multiple mirrors on site, and came up with electrical lighting layouts to support the architect’s vision.

Lighting spatially divides the installation into two worlds: experiential moments of eternity between mirrors are rendered with colour-changing (RGBW) lights, and spaces behind the mirrors — the “inverse world” — are rendered with warm 2,700k white light. The largest hanging band crossing the courtyard is filled with mist as a giant “cloud luminaire.” RGBW lighting fixtures run along the structure and illuminate the cloud from within, while multiple flood lights around the cloud emphasise its three-dimensionality.

The installation opened to the public in MoMA PS1’s courtyard on 28 June 2018 and will remain on view through 3 September. This year’s installation is the latest in a long history of Arup’s participation in the programme. Recently, we contributed to Jenny Sabin Studio’s design of Lumen in 2017 and The Living’s Hy-Fi in 2014.