QUEENS MUSEUM OF ART

By doubling its overall area, the Queens Museum of Art will have the largest space in New York for exhibiting new art forms. The nature of this art — its scale, its materiality (or lack thereof), its permanence, its meaning — is entirely unknown. On the one hand, the indeterminacy of this condition suggested to us that the Museum would require an ultra-flexible set of spaces. On the other, an architecture of flexibility appears antithetical to the notion that architecture itself is figurally propositional. Our response was to suggest that the Museum’s curatorial form (its policies, its public persona, and its spatial ethos) might stem from the very matter of its indeterminacy.

A winding scrim maneuvers, forms, and amplifies potential. The double curtain layer — sheer and opaque — snakes its way through the unknowably vast possibilities of the QMA’s curatorial future. The curtain’s supple two-story path unleashes circuits (for organizing), coils (for storing), layers (for sequencing), and loops (for enclosing). Lighting tracks, display systems, projection screens, digital networks, mechanical chases, and electrical conduits coincide with the curtain’s path, further intensifying its catalytic role.

Nesting, intersecting, enveloping, spreading, encircling, and bunching. Circuits, coils, layers and loops slide along the curtain’s structure. Textile rooms choreograph countless scenarios: rooms can be spread out, creating a distributed network of display, installation, and educational areas; rooms can aggregate into compact clusters, forming ancillary spaces whose intimate density opens up vast areas for the great hall; rooms can line up in a museological enfilade, underscoring the repetitive sequence of the curtain’s primary organizational ethos.

The curtain’s loops slip out from the existing building, providing lighting, backdrops for sculpture and seating, and signage at a Flushing Meadows-scale. The S’s shimmering scrims entice passers-by and announce exhibitions, events, even the QMA itself.