Tom Wiscombe

Wiscombe's Light-Wing was the winning project in MoMA/P.S.1's fourth annual Young Architects Program, a yearly competition that calls on emerging architects to provide the setting for the summer Warm Up series, a weekly live music program held in the courtyard of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, New York. Designers' architectural solutions must modulate sun, shade, and water in innovative ways.
Wiscombe's design was inspired by sails, kites, and other tension structures traditionally found at the beach that exploit dynamic forces like wind and sunlight. It was also motivated by natural formations, such as tidal pools and open-air arboreal canopies that provide shade from the sun. The design is defined by two elements: a translucent, permeable roof of interconnected canoelike shapes that cover portions of P.S.1's courtyard, and a leisure landscape with two long pools that creates new passageways through the monumental courtyard and provides an escape from the summer heat by offering new spaces for swimming and lounging. In this predominantly horizontal design, the only significant vertical elements are the existing courtyard walls. The installation reinvents itself at night through a landscape of fluorescent lights that playfully mingle with the diaphanous materials and porous spaces. Light-Wing was dismantled at the end of the summer; this model is its only physical record.