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Stay Cool: ICEBERGS ahead at the National Building Museum

Stay Cool: ICEBERGS ahead at the National Building Museum

The National Building Museum, in Washington D.C., will open a radical new exhibition, ICEBERGS, on July 2 of this year. Designed by New York–based landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations, the exhibition will feature stunning underwater glacial ice fields that stretch across the Museum’s Great Hall.

The one-of-a-kind installation will focus on three recurring themes of construction, geometry, and landscape representation.

Part of the museum’s Summer Block Party series, Corner’s ICEBERGS includes glacial-style landscaping throughout the Great Hall, all coming in a various sizes comprising reusable construction materials like scaffolding and polycarbonate paneling—often found in greenhouses.

Hanging 20 feet from the ceiling, a “water line” divides the space which subsequently facilitates panoramic views from both the supposed ocean surface plane and down below by the icebergs. The “bergs” however, aren’t exactly small. Designed to appear imposing and at times ominous, the tallest artificial iceberg area will rise to 56 feet, soaring above the waterline up to the third-story balcony.

A viewing area has also been incorporated into the inside the largest iceberg, allowing visitors to step inside, walk along an undersea bridge, chill out in icy seabed grottos, choose from a selection of “shaved-ice snacks,” and engage in educational programs on landscape architecture and the environment.

Corner said in a press release,“ICEBERGS invokes the surreal underwater-world of glacial ice fields. Such a world is both beautiful and ominous given our current epoch of climate change, ice-melt, and rising seas. The installation creates an ambient field of texture, movement, and interaction, as in an unfolding landscape of multiples, distinct from a static, single object.”

All in all, ICEBERGS will take up 12,540 square feet within the museum. The exhibit runs through September 5, 2016.

 

ICEBERGS symbolizes an extreme counterpoint to the sweltering heat of the Washington, D.C. summer,” said Chase W. Rynd, executive director of the National Building Museum. “We hope that James Corner Field Operations’ striking design will provoke both serious public conversation about the complex relationship between design and landscape, while also eliciting a sense of wonder and play among visitors of all ages.”

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