The MoMA PS1 courtyard provides a constant setting for projects that change each season. The Young Architects Program (YAP), a collaboration between The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, invites emerging architectural talent to design temporary outdoor installations with shade, seating, and water. The program also incorporates environmental criteria, including sustainability and recycling.
The continuity of the site makes it possible to compare different responses without reducing them to a formula. Some interventions make the existing geometry visible; others add surfaces and atmospheres, or turn normally hidden systems into part of the experience. The courtyard becomes more than a backdrop for activity: it helps organize gatherings, routes, and ways of perceiving the surroundings.
Designing without erasing what is already there
In Holding Pattern, Interboro Partners’ proposal avoids altering the main enclosure and foregrounds its seven-sided polygonal shape. A canopy of ropes and sails defines the space and provides shade without ground-level supports that would interrupt the perception of the courtyard. Attention shifts to visitors and movable elements—benches, stools, shallow pools, and ping-pong tables—that allow different ways of occupying the space.
The side courtyards receive different treatments: one is lined with mirrors, while the other is filled with a dense urban wood. The canopy casts shifting shadows across the interior and exterior concrete walls. In this way, a structure overhead also affects how the site is perceived from the street. The project also incorporates furniture and trees intended for donation to the surrounding community at the end of the summer.
The strategy can be read as a decision about where to place the focus. Rather than turning the structure into an isolated object, Holding Pattern lets shade, movable elements, and the presence of other people define the courtyard experience. This is an interpretation of the project, not a claim about how every visitor experienced it.
Creating atmospheres through surfaces and elements
In 2016, Weaving the Courtyard, by Escobedo Soliz Studio, combined a woven canopy with earthworks to create different atmospheres. The project description says these elements were intended to encourage visitors to slow down and reconsider their relationship with one another, the landscape, and the sky. A raised bed of sand, a reflective pool, and a space with cooling misters formed a sequence of textures, colors, and light.
Where the canopy in Holding Pattern highlights the pre-existing shape, this intervention is understood through new topography and distinct atmospheres. In both cases, the temporary architecture does more than cover a surface: it organizes conditions for staying, moving, and meeting. The difference lies in the spatial means each team brings to the foreground.
Making resources and processes visible
Other projects directed experimentation toward materials or environmental systems. Hy-Fi, by The Living, was conceived as a circular tower built from organic bricks made with corn stalks and project-developed root structures, alongside reflective bricks made with mirror film. The proposal set out to return the organic materials to the soil cycle and reuse the reflective ones in later research. Its description also presented an arrangement intended to direct light inward and move air to create a cool microclimate. These are documented design aims and proposals, not an independent assessment of performance.
In COSMO, by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, water became both a subject and a visible part of the installation. The project was described as a movable artifact made from irrigation components, conceived to make the city’s pipe system perceptible and to filter water over a four-day cycle. The proposal linked this operation to a gathering space and an invitation to talk about water. The available documentation presents the project as a prototype; it is not sufficient to conclude that it provided visitors with drinking water or that its operation was independently verified.
Comparing these works does not justify claiming that they all share the same method or that their environmental results are equivalent. It does reveal a range of approaches: an installation can work with shade and furniture, create atmospheres through surfaces and water, or make materials and processes part of its public argument.
One program, different ways to use the courtyard
The YAP format combines a recognizable site and brief with a new design response. According to the program’s general description, proposals are selected through a process in which around 50 firms are nominated, their portfolios are reviewed, and five finalists are chosen to submit preliminary proposals. The winning team develops a temporary outdoor installation.
The most fruitful aspect of this repetition is that it allows concrete decisions to be observed, not just striking forms: how much of the site is preserved, how shade is distributed, what invites people to pause, and which resources are made visible. In the MoMA PS1 courtyard, each project proposes a different relationship among structure, environment, and collective use. Architecture thus appears less as an autonomous object than as a way of organizing the conditions for a shared experience.
At a glance
Scope
Editorial reading; it does not constitute a visit or a technical assessment.
Sources and references
New York / Young Architects Program ↗24/10/2026 MoMA, New York / Young Architects Program: Holding Pattern.
New York / Young Architects Program ↗24/10/2026 MoMA, New York / Young Architects Program: Weaving the Courtyard.
New York / Young Architects Program ↗24/10/2026 MoMA, New York / Young Architects Program: Hy-Fi.
New York / Young Architects Program ↗24/10/2026 MoMA, New York / Young Architects Program: COSMO.
New York / Young Architects Program ↗24/10/2026
About / Young Architects Program ↗24/10/2026 MoMA, About / Young Architects Program.
New York / Young Architects Program ↗24/10/2026
New York / Young Architects Program ↗24/10/2026
New York / Young Architects Program ↗28/10/2026
Young Architects Program (YAP) | MoMA ↗31/10/2026 MoMA, Young Architects Program (YAP).