THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART AND P.S.1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER LAUNCH RISING CURRENTS: PROJECTS FOR NEW YORK’S WATERFRONT, AN INITIATIVE TO CREATE INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS FOR NEW YORK’S HARBORS
Subway Car Reefs, Oyster Farms & Wind Turbines at Statue of Liberty Island
Architect Teams Will Design Proposals During Eight-Week Workshop for MoMA Exhibition in 2010
Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront
Part 1: Architects in Residence Workshop
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
November 16, 2009–January 8, 2010
Part II: Exhibition
The Museum of Modern Art
March 24–August 10, 2010
NEW YORK, November 2, 2009—The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center announce Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, a major, eight-month initiative that will bring together teams of architects, engineers, and landscape designers to address and create infrastructure solutions to make New York City more resilient in response to rising water levels and to protect endangered eco-systems. The future of New York’s waterfronts has been identified as one of the most urgent challenges the nation’s largest city faces, with the anticipated rise in sea levels due to climate change. Comprising an eight-week architects-in-residence workshop at P.S.1 beginning November 16, followed by an exhibition of the resulting design proposals at MoMA, Rising Currents’ purpose is to address the need for the design of adaptive “soft” infrastructures for New York and New Jersey’s Upper Bay.
“The necessity of a response to the regional and national discourse on infrastructure from a contemporary view of high-quality design that also embraces sound ecology has been of urgency for some years, and has taken on new actuality given the national agenda of looking to innovative infrastructure,” said Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA and organizer of Rising Currents. “Rising Currents will undertake new design research in an interdisciplinary way to solve problems that are both local in application and global in implication.”
Four multidisciplinary teams of rising talent at established New York architectural firms have been selected to participate in the eight-week workshop and create models that propose solutions for the effects of climate change on specific areas of New York and New Jersey waterfronts.
“This is an ideal opportunity to use P.S.1 and MoMA as laboratories for new ideas, and to harness the talent of young design practitioners who may be underemployed as a result of the current economic recession,” added Mr. Bergdoll.
