Party Wall

New York City, NY, United States

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Party Wall

New York City, NY, United States

Firm

CODA

Type

Cultural › Pavilion

YEAR

2013

Party Wall is the winning design in MoMA PS1’s 2013 Young Architects Program annual competition. Answering a brief that asks for shade, seating, and water, for Saturday “Warm-Up” Parties, as well as temporary seating for week-day lectures and film screenings, Party Wall acts as storage device for 200 removable benches.

The true technical definition of Party Wall is intended: a wall shared between different users. Weaving together the “bones” and “blanks” that are the by-product of eco-friendly skateboard company Comet Skateboards, Party Wall creates a porous façade that is inhabitable at a range of scales. At its feet, a series of pools is fed via a gravity-operated fountain. Ballasted by glowing water pillows and using left-over steel angle, the structure engages both the urban scale and the scale of the courtyard.

Party Wall is a vertical shade that creates space by the shadow that it casts; that acts as a stage-set for a series of micro-performances, and that sheds its skin in order to accommodate those events. It provokes the question: Does it say something? And if so, what does it say? In fact, it does not say anything in itself, it says something only in relation to the ground and the sun, and even then, says little, except what it would like to be: a WALL.