The Beastie was created for the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program competition, an annual invitation-only competition to design a temporary, outdoor installation. The Young Architects Program founded by MoMA and MoMA PS1 is committed to offering emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design and present innovative projects, challenging each year’s winners to develop original designs for a courtyard installation at MoMA PS1 that provides shade, seating, and water. Here new trends become solutions in sustainability and design and are tested and experienced. The MoMA PS1 installations reach out to the design and building industries and the public worldwide.

The Beastie is a thermally interactive structure with its own energy input and
self-regulating mechanism, in constant reaction to outdoor temperatures and the
heat emitted from visitors’ bodies and breath. The Beastie is composed of a forest
of radiant pipes covered with ice, movable tracks of iridescent PVC strips and cavernous grottoes conditioned by aluminized fabric. Gradients of cold offer delight and thrill visitors during the hot summer days. The Beastie creates an uncanny summertime chill while enabling the sensing of cooling, soothing and comforting spaces. In times of greater inhabitation and interaction with the Beastie, the temperatures flow and the ice melts, reminding us that we impact the world we live within; and also, like the ice, of our bodies’ vulnerabilities, pleasures and constraints.

Marrying the heaven with the earth, the Beastie is a climatic offspring. It transforms solar heat into ice. The Beastie follows a genealogy of climatic “beasts” - some real, others fiction - born in moments of climatic awareness and environmental vulnerability. It comes into the world as a machinic creature that brings us into contact with our own climate confusions, offering a platform for the collective experience of disquieting and delightful temperature. Energetically, the Beastie is a self-sustaining refrigerator transforming solar heat into ice through a compression chiller. When the chiller is fed by electricity from the sun, it releases its excess heat
through a ventilation shaft. The ice emerges on the radiant coils, 35 loops dispersed throughout the space and located amongst PVC and aluminized curtains. The density of ice on the pipes, coupled with the various curtains, create
various temperatures -sensed and choreographed by the visitors.

The construction is based on a glass house structure; the roof level integrates the pipes; on the left, the heat is given off overhead; on the right, icy vertical pipes cool the various areas.

The Beastie:
[1] IT SELF-SUSTAINS
[2] IT DELIGHTS
[3] IT EDUCATES