Space Craft
Tom Wiscombe's Light-Wing for the P.S. 1 Center for Contemporary Art is
as forward looking in the way it was built as it is in its form.
By Julien Devereux
Photography by Sean Hemmerle for Metropolis
October 2003
Tom Wiscombe was born to build. "I was a Lego freak," he says.
"It's kind of ridiculous, but I even had an architects' table when
I was in the fifth grade." His enthusiasm for the craft of architecture
is everywhere apparent in Light-Wing, the temporary pavilion that Emergent--Wiscombe's
Los Angeles-based firm--designed and built in the courtyard of the
P.S. 1 Center for Contemporary Art in Queens, New York. Hovering over the
courtyard like an enormous aluminum dragonfly, Light-Wing provides
shade, places to sit, and cooling pools of water for the throngs of music
and art enthusiasts who attend Warm Up, the museum's raucous Saturday afternoon
summer dance-party series. At night spotlights inside the roof structure
make the cladding glow a bright pinkish red, and the dragonfly becomes
a lightning bug, a beacon sure to entice any passers-by to the party.
For the last four years P.S. 1 and the Museum of Modern Art (the two are
affiliated) have held a competition, the Young Architects Program,
for the design of an "urban beach" setting for Warm Up. The program's
objective is to identify zzzand encourage emerging architectural talent,
and in that it has been remarkably successful. Previous winners include
Lindy Roy, William Massie, and SHoP/Sharples Holden Pasquarelli--whose wave-like
wooden structure in 2000 largely put them on the map (and on the pages of
Metropolis). As this year's winner, Wiscombe was awarded just $60,000
to build the project--and something much more valuable: a high-profile
platform from which show off his work.
The Warm Up party aims to bring a new and younger audience to the P.S. 1
collection, and Light-Wing may prove a stronger draw than the music. It's
an impressively massive and sturdy piece, and its undulating mesh surfaces
are sure to send architectural theory fans into a swoon. But when Wiscombe
talks about his project, he always comes back to the practical aspects of
building. "The key for this project was the roof structure, obviously,"
he says. "It was generated first as a field of independent
objects--long horizontal structures we're calling 'canoes.' The canoes are
clad in aluminum mesh, and then there's a second cladding that goes over
the entire thing." Wiscombe clearly relishes the challenge of making
a coherent design out of these discrete objects, and not just because the
resulting roof looks like "a mutant or hybrid landscape." "Each
canoe is actually standing on its own columns," he says. "But
they work together, too. You can start to remove some of the columns, because
the canoes rely on one another for structural support. You can read this
thing as a series of objects, but also as a larger organism."
Light-Wing is Emergent's first completed project. Until now most of
Wiscombe's work has been with Vienna-based Coop Himmelb(l)au, where he is
still a project partner. His output includes the radical 1998 UFA Cinema
Palace, in Dresden, the yet-to-be-completed Akron Art Museum, in Ohio, and
a science museum, in Lyon, France. Wiscombe, who is 33, first started
working with Coop Himmelb(l)au upon completing his undergraduate degree
at UC Berkeley. He had hoped to work at Frank Gehry's office, but no
positions were open. Someone there suggested he try Coop Himmelb(l)au, which
had a studio in Los Angeles at the time. While working there under founding
partner Wolf Prix he finished a masters at UCLA's architecture school
and launched Emergent in 1999.
Light-Wing was completed through a similarly serendipitous route: a mix
of institutional risk-taking, informal networking, and the sort of non-hierarchical
teamwork you might expect from a native Californian. (Wiscombe was born
in La Jolla, near San Diego.) Wiscombe was nominated, along with Rogers
Marvel Architects, by Metropolis senior editor Paul Makovsky for
the Young Architects Program, which solicits nominations from curators,
architects, critics, and editors every year. From that group, five
finalists (including Rogers Marvel) were selected to present their
designs to the jury. Terence Riley, architectural curator at MoMA and head
of the Young Architects Program, says that Wiscombe's ability to convince
the judging panel that he could do the work even though he was based in
L.A. and Vienna was crucial. "He brought his frequent-flyer miles
statement to the final presentation to show that it would not cost
him any extra to be coming back and forth from Vienna and Los Angeles to
New York," he says. "His presentation was very thorough and very
well done." When he was selected, Wiscombe rounded up friends and student
volunteers and entrusted the contract work to an old junior-high friend,
Emergent project leader Burr Dodd, a gallerist, general contractor, and
artist (his latest work involved projecting laser beams through fish
tanks filled with honey). "We had a lot of people helping,"
Wiscombe says. In addition to his construction manager, welding team, project
designer Dionicio Valdez, and two team leaders, Wiscombe employed about
20 interns: students from SCI-Arc (where he teaches) and others who had
heard him lecture at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and the University
of Wisconsin. "It was all word of mouth, and it worked out pretty well,"
he says.
PAGE 1 2 3 |
NEXT |
 |
 |
|
Architect Tom Wiscombe--whose firm Emergent is known for its biomorphic and
fractal-inspired structures--designed this year's pavilion at the P.S.1
Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens. Construction (pictured
here) began in early May. |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Built to shade the throngs of people partying from mid-afternoon to dusk in the
P.S. 1 courtyard, Wiscombe's Light-Wing hovers over the crowd (above). The
structural elements (red, in the rendering below) are united by a mesh cladding. |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Wiscombe's team places the "canoes" in series (above) and lifts
them into place (below). |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Clad individually in expanded wire mesh (above), which is also wrapped around
the structure as a whole, Light-Wing requires minimal columnar support (below). |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Assembled via word-of-mouth, Wiscombe's team (above) includes a construction
manager, project designer, two team leaders, welders, and a group of dedicated
students from SCI-Arc, Pratt, Columbia, and Wisconsin. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
BACK TO TOP;MM_showHideLayers('navdepts','','hide')){kind=small}
;MM_showHideLayers('navfeats','','hide')){kind=small}
;MM_showHideLayers('navcolumns','','hide')){kind=small}
