Art And Farming At PS1 Queens

I’ll admit I used to love the Summer WarmUp series at PS1 Museum in Queens. It had a good run of interesting architecture installations compliments of the Young Architects Program. And the music was pretty cool. Then a few years ago it got in a rut. Well from an architectural standpoint. All the installations looked too much the same.

Hence my jaw dropping when this years pick was unveiled created by NYC based Work Architecture. It’s a huge departure in both form and function from years past. Work’s husband and wife team Dan Wood and Amale Andraos proposed a working farm complete with a varied crop of produce and a plan to harvest it all. They have imagined growing everything from mint to peas, fennel and pumpkins in individual cardboard tubes commonly used to create concrete molds.

But beyond the farm concept, Work added a host of unique ideas to augment the Saturday concert events. Arranged among all the planting tubes is a fabric tube that people can enter to get a break from the party. There are also two sound tubes, one that plays farm sounds when you sit down, another in which you can look upward, see stars and hear crickets. There is a phone-charging column, a children’s grotto of columns with swings, an herb-growing column with circulating fans dispersing scents like basil or lavender, and a juicer column where fresh juice will be made and sold.

[via NYT]