Summer Fling

To many New Yorkers, the opening of Liquid Sky, this year’s courtyard installation for P.S. 1’s Warm Up, will herald the start of summer. But to creators Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues it begins the cycle of another temporary work. The design-build duo created the tensile pavilion from a tentlike surface composed of custom-made Mylar petals and stretched across utility poles. Ball calls it “a new sky that changes the color and enhances the carnivalesque atmosphere of the space throughout the day.”

The architects’ past projects include installations in Los Angeles at MOCA’s Skin + Bones opening-night party, the Tiffany & Company launch for Frank Gehry’s jewelry line, and Maximilian’s Schell in the Materials & Applications courtyard gallery (see “Courtyard Vortex,” October 2005, p. 50). “We often use nonstandard assembly systems with our projects,” Ball says. “We like to be able to continue to explore different techniques and materials.” They may have opted for different methods with Sky and Schell, but the structural similarities between them are not, Ball admits, entirely coincidental.