Space-Altering Installation at the Brooklyn Museum

In 1897, the year the opened, crinoline skirts were in fashion. Now, they make a reappearance of sorts, dressing 16 columns in the museum’s Great Hall.

Billowing hoop skirts were one major source of inspiration for the space-altering installation, “reOrder: An Architectural Environment by Situ Studio,” which opened last week and remains up for the rest of the year. The pleated tents of white fabric, stretched over steel and plywood frames in varying shapes around each column, shade the hall like protective parasols or giant Wonderland mushrooms.

“It’s definitely a very spatial installation,” said Aleksey Lukyanov-Cherny, one of Situ Studio’s five founding partners. “It takes over the space and breaks up the rigidity of the 16-column grid. I’d like to say the space is a lot more fluid – maybe one no longer walks in a straight line in the space. Hopefully it diverts people.”

Two years ago, the museum invited the Brooklyn-based architectural design studio to submit a proposal for a Great Hall installation to mark the 10,000-square-foot gallery’s renovation. Situ Studio won the competition with their site-specific idea, which drew inspiration from the museum’s history and collections (such as its cache of costumes and dresses).

The folds and pleats of the fabric acknowledge the classical lines of the columns beneath, but expand (literally) and update those architectural principles with swelling, softening forms. The installation’s materials also introduce a technological element: the durable Sunbrella fabric and the solid surfacing of the benches and tables worked into the base of each column are materials used, respectively, in challenging outdoor environments and electronic devices.

“The materials are very much high-tech, the result of science and research, so I hope people would see the connection to both history and current-day technological advances,” Lukyanov-Cherny said.

Planning and construction of the project stretched over the course of a year. Situ Studio’s approach generally sidesteps designs on paper or computer as much as possible and proceeds straight to markups and models following development of the idea.

Plans for the forms to surround the columns remained flexible, so that when the time came to install them, they could adapt to the site. The fabric was not cut in specific patterns but unfurled in straight rolls, to be pleated and folded into different shapes as required.

Production took about two months of bending steel tubing and plywood rings, folding and stretching fabric, and using a sophisticated heat process called “thermoforming” to transform the surfacing sheets into benches and tables.

Museum visitors can sit at the base of the columns, and the installation’s creators hope the dream-like canopies will inspire different behavior than in the hall’s usual space.

“Our most exciting moment is not when the installation is completed, but when we see people in the space and interacting with the sculpture,” Lukyanov-Cherny said, “hopefully enjoying it, using it – whatever their purpose is.”

The changed environment certainly recalibrates the atmosphere in the hall, tuning it to greater intimacy than grandeur, as certain visitors have already sensed: the space has been booked for a wedding reception later this year.

Members of Situ Studio will discuss their work at 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 16 in the Great Hall, located on the first floor of the museum.