Mutant Form

For those who would like to dance in hyperspace, L.A.-based architect Hernan Diaz Alonso is constructing a spiny parallel universe for the “Warm Up” series that brings DJs and live bands to the courtyard of the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens each summer. The title—SUR, after an Argentinean tango that poetically references “a large wall”—alludes to the fourteen-and-a-half-foot walls that enclose the triangular site.

Diaz Alonso’s firm, Xefirotarch, used a filmmaking animation program—which replicates a single form in incremental variations—to design the structure. “This experimental approach operates more in the logic of film—how it is edited, made by parts, and assembled together,” he says. Carcasslike bent aluminum canopies wrapped in neoprene will shade urethane-molded seats and foot pools. “I think the built structure will be very close to the design, but who knows?” Diaz Alonso says. “Over time things change and mutate.”