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Tue, 30 Apr 2013 01:39:07 +0100

shanepluskevin: NEW TENT Competition to design innovative...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 05:29:06 +0100

NEW TENT

Competition to design innovative street fair tent in New York for Arts and Ideas Festival. Sponsored by the Storefront for Architecture and the New Museum.

Close your eyes and imagine the new museum. Picture the whole building. Now picture it rotated ninety degrees. It becomes horizontal. Next scale it down. And let it come to rest in the middle of the bowery. This will be the form of NEW TENT which we propose for Streetfest.

NEW TENT is a new take on the form of the new museum, and a new take on the street-tent typology.

NEW TENT uses basic building blocks - rectilinear forms, aluminum pipe, and vinyl sheeting - to achieve extremely complex visual effects while delineating a series of spaces catered towards the streetfest’s multifaceted programmatic requirements.

The heart of NEW TENT’s phenomenological fireworks comes from it’s laser cut sheeting. the vinyl (that makes up the sheeting) is cut out in 2” holes along a regular grid. This simple act of removal acts simultaneously to cast highly complex shadows, and to create an ever changing moire: the semi-transparent surfaces of the sheeting change in relationship to each other and to the viewer as the viewer walks around and through the tent.

Further, NEW TENT features a roof composed of these same laser cut sheets. But in this instance, the sheeting is doubled. While the experience of the tent’s elevation allows for a doubling of its skin to occur while looking through its perpendicular wall surfaces, the interior experience relies on a more intentionally duplicitous skin. A skin which creates an even more consistent and apparent moire against the ever changing backdrop of the sky itself.

Thus while NEW TENT is a product of its urban environment and its architectural surroundings and precedents, it ultimately yearns to present its viewer with an experience that is aesthetically wondrous and connected to the abstracted natural environment, just as much as the man made one which surrounds it and its city dwelling visitors.