Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers of Dream the Combine: Hide & Seek

Hide & Seek by Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers of Dream The Combine, in collaboration with Clayton Binkley of Arup, will be 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 2 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. Bloomberg Philanthropies has supported the Young Architects Program since 2007. In 2016, MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art were thrilled to announce that this lead sponsorship had been extended for three years, enabling the Young Architects Program to thrive and excite audiences through summer 2018.

Press contact
Molly Kurzius: T 718 392 6447 / molly_kurzius [​at​] moma.org / press_momaps1 [​at​] moma.org

For downloadable high-resolution images, visit moma.org/press.