P.S.1 Finalist Entry: Bottle Service by MASS

On February 16, the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 announced the winner of the 12th annual Young Architects Program: Interboro Partners with its winning entry Holding Pattern. Today, we are very excited to also publish some of the finalist entries. The first one is the proposal Bottle Service by MASS Design Group.

Project Description from the Architects:

Our Project, Bottle Service, captures that summer impulse to cool off by activating the senses of the subaquatic and urban refreshment. Beneath a stream of seemingly floating and frozen forms, Bottle Service is an urban menagerie, a refracted surface, a transformative plunge unique only to this courtyard, to this borough, to this moment.

As an organization we seek to ask: how can architects add the most lasting social and economic value to a place? For our proposal for the MoMA and MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, our challenge was how can the most impermanent of structures – the pavilion – leave the most lasting and positive impact on the community.

Built from all recycled and recyclable materials, Bottle Service is an architectural statement that proposes that any architecture, if choreographed well, can have lasting environmental, social and economic impact.

By establishing collaborations with groups such as, The Center for Architecture Foundation, Flux Factory, The East River Development Alliance, and Emeco, our proposal for the courtyard seeks to build ownership through engagement. Our project Involves the community throughout the construction process, as well as creates an ongoing series of art and architecture workshops to take place at PS1 over the summer for the community.

MATERIALS:

• By transforming recyclable materials into new forms Bottle Service transcends junkitecture.
• Plastic bottles are shrink wrapped in a reflective silver coating, transforming them into a refined new raw material.
• Bottles are strung using this simple system to allow kids and students to participate in the construction.
• Working with local artisans we transform Tyvek, a waterproofing material used in construction, into a new fabric that envelops our suspended forms.

DISASSEMBLY > ADDED VALUE

• The canopy structure is comprised of prefabricated aluminum stage trusses that will cycle back into use after the event while the Tyvek sheething material will all be sent back to the manufacturer, Dupont, where it will be recycled into plastic furniture like picnic tables.
• The bottles, all 55,500 of them, will be taken by EMECO, which that makes the iconic Navy 111 out of recycled bottles to produce a limited edition, custom blue MoMA PS1 Bottle Service chair that can be sold. The revenue generated from the chairs will be donated to the nonprofits in Queens who we partnered with during the process.

Bottle Service shows architecture as an investment in communities. Creating not only added economic and social value, our proposal proves that the socially engaged and the architecturally progressive are not independent, but one and the same.

All images courtesy of MASS Design Group.