NJIT Associate Professor Georgeen Theodore and her partners were the winners of this year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. Theodore is a co-founder and principal of the New York City-based Interboro Partners. Interboro won the 2011 competition with its proposal Holding Pattern, a project for MoMA PS1′s courtyard that opened to the public in June, 2011.  

The Young Architects Program asks architects to create a temporary environment for the 6,000 people who attend the museum’s summer concert series every weekend from June through August. To create Holding Pattern, Interboro asked MoMA PS1′s neighbors the following question: Is there something you need that we could design, use in the courtyard during the summer, and then donate to you when Holding Pattern is deinstalled in the fall? Interboro talked to taxi management companies, libraries, high schools, senior and daycare centers, community gardens, a post office, and dozens of other Long Island City–based institutions, trying to make matches between things the neighborhood needed and things MoMA PS1′s courtyard needed. The result is an eclectic collection of objects—including mirrors, ping-pong tables, a lifeguard chair, a rock-climbing wall, and eighty-four trees—that the architects might not have thought to include in its design but that enhanced the experience of the courtyard and strengthened connections between MoMA PS1 and its surroundings. In the fall of 2011, a total of seventy-nine objects and eighty-four trees were donated to more than fifty organizations in Long Island City and beyond. Many NJIT College of Architecture and Design students and recent graduates from the B.Arch, M.Arch and MIP programs were members of the competition, design and installation teams, and made a significant contribution to the project. 

Matt Gosser, adjunct faculty member at the College of Architecture and Design, has curated a retrospective of the works of Claire Wagner Kosterlitz, a Bauhaus artist who emigrated to the United States, at the Jewish Museum of New Jersey in Newark.  Gosser, who is active in the Newark art scene, also serves as curator of the CoAD Gallery in Weston Hall.

Assistant Professor Matt Burgermaster has won the 2011-2012 ACSA Faculty Design Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) for his project “Ice Cycle House”.  This small prototype home located in Buffalo, New York, demonstrates an alternative approach to conventional sustainable design and construction practices with a unique combination of high and low tech strategies that integrate digital fabrication, prefabricated components, and low-cost materials.  The award will be presented at the 100th ACSA Annual Meeting, which will be held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on March 1-4, 2012.