P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

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P.S.1 Newspaper

2009 Fall

A History of YAP: If These Walls Could Talk

From the time that it was transformed from an abandoned schoolhouse into an exhibition space in 1976, P.S.1 has always employed architecture as an active and accessible part of an artistic experience. What was once a closed off structure for nearly fifteen years became invigorated with site-specific and building-incorporating installations created by budding artists in the inaugural exhibition Rooms. These artists were encouraged to create works out of and in response to the building that housed them—an unlikely but charmingly gritty three-story Romanesque Revival school. A trend had ignited. P.S.1 would continue to discover new ways of activating architecture, changing it from an impenetrable structure into a tangible experience.

With Rooms, P.S.1 presented a new dynamic perspective of a public art space, one that cleverly shifted architecture into the heart of an exhibition. In Gordon Matta-Clark’s Door, Floors, Doors, a rectangular cutout in the floor extended from one door in the same position on each of the building’s three levels allowing visitors to peer through and observe the physical core of P.S.1. The cutouts made it impossible to take the building for granted as one was confronted with the basic foundation of the architecture.

Nearly two decades later, at the “reopening” of P.S.1 in 1997, Eric Orr engaged the concrete walls of the courtyard as his medium by cutting three slits directly through its surface, offering a glimpse of the building from the sidewalk on Jackson Avenue as well as transforming the nature of the wall itself. Like Matta-Clark’s revealing cutouts in each floor, the slits provided an unexpected view of the building, one that asserted the architecture’s presence and made interaction with it a necessary component.

The Young Architects Program is the lovechild of P.S.1’s experimentation with accessibility and tangibility in architecture. In its formative stages starting in 1998, it began simultaneously with the WarmUp music series. The Austrian collective Gelitin created the courtyard installation Percutaneous Delights that served as an interactive environment for a huge crowd dancing to subversive music all summer long. The installation included a large inflated globe of water and a towering column of furniture that stood in the center of the WarmUp excitement. The gathering crowd did more than just observe Percutaneous Delights, they took cue from its seductive title and unabashedly entered the ballooning globe and climbed the tower of furniture.

The following year in 1999, Philip Johnson, founder and former director of The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design, constructed a performance area, dance floor, bleacher-style benches, and platforms as one unified architectural entity in the courtyard. This large-scale installation accommodated and engaged the burgeoning WarmUp crowd. Like Gelitin, Johnson had created an alluring work that encouraged the audience to become active participants. After the groundbreaking success of the two courtyard installations, an official annual architectural program was created by P.S.1 and The Museum of Modern Art in 2000.

YAP along with WarmUp have both grown into much-anticipated summer events. Several months before the season, design firms are called to propose temporary installations for P.S.1’s distinctive outdoor space. Winning installations of each year, selected by a jury of P.S.1 and MoMA staff, always incorporate recurring elements of shade, water, and seating that can withstand a three to five month exhibition cycle and thousands of people, both general and WarmUp visitors, coming into contact with the structure.

This notion of temporary architecture that the Young Architects Program presents challenges the very definition of architecture itself. It becomes much more of a sensory experience. Each summer, a towering structure that can often be seen outside of P.S.1’s grounds ignites curiosity and beckons visitors to not only observe provocative architecture but to participate, touch, and interact with the environment created. The result pays homage to a rich history of engaging, experimenting, and reacting to an uncharacteristic space for contemporary art.