Client: MoMA PS1

Overview

BEATFUSE! is the winning project of the 2006 Young Architects Program organized annually by PS1 Contemporary Art Center and the Museum of Modern Art as the site of their popular Warm Up series. Every Saturday of the summer, a yearly ritual celebrating music, art and architecture takes place here, highlighting the cosmopolitan diversity of the city’s population. Most New Yorkers are originally from somewhere else, they come to the city looking for something important they need in their lives, they are seekers.

Goals

WarmUp is the recurrent moment in the city’s annual cycle when this multiplicity converges in one place at one time in one great big happening. Everyone becomes an artist. Each unique voice blends together into a whole for a few moments every summer Saturday without losing its individuality, like two dissimilar songs seamlessly eased into each other by a DJ’s masterful beatmatch.

The creation of a space with interiority, a background to the figure of the WarmUp crowds, requires precise architectural operations. To evoke a sense of interior space the proposed structure extends to the boundaries of the site, and matter is spread thin to achieve the most with the least.

Process

OBRA Architects, based in New York, was founded in 2000 by partners Pablo Castro and Jennifer Lee. As a growing firm dedicated to achieving design excellence and innovation, OBRA Architects has a strong background in the implementation of built work from conceptual inception on both large and small scales.

Additional Information

“No two New Yorkers are alike; everyone moves to a different beat. When the Warm Up DJs match tunes, beats fuse. Form follows tension and air is suffused with mist and light, as all dance under a penumbra of moiré.” - Pablo Castro, Principal of OBRA Architects