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CODA's "Party Wall," the winner of MoMA's 2013 Young Architects Program opened this week at PS1 in Queens. The structure, which by contest rules has to provide shade, seating, and water for the Warm Up concert series, has 120 detachable tables and benches and a water system that supplies a nearby fountain. The "Party Wall" also meets the sustainable guidelines of the program by using recycled materials from the Comet skateboard company, also based in CODA's home city of Ithaca, NY.

The Party Wall will be installed until August 31. Read MoMA's brief about the "Party Wall," and check out the schedule for this summer's Warm Up series. 




All images courtesy of Charles Roussel and MoMA. 

It takes approximately 200 trucks worth of dirt to build a two-acre field of wheat in lower Manhattan. And if farmed correctly, those two acres can grow about 1,000 pounds of healthy, edible wheat.

Those figures are not an estimate. In 1982, directly adjacent to the World Trade Center, artist Agnes Denes planted and farmed two acres of golden wheat as part of an installation called "Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan." The confrontation she describes isn't limited to the visual strangeness of seeing a farmer ride a tractor in front of a city skyline. Instead, the project also speaks to the confrontation of farming wheat on land valued at $4.5 billion, and bigger issues of mismanagement leading to world hunger and food waste. 

After the harvest, Denes took the grain to 28 cities and distributed the seeds for planting in a number of countries.

Photos from Confrontation are on exhibit at MoMa's Ps1 in Queens as part of their #Expo1 series.