Photo: Alan R. Tansey
What do you get when you give $3,000-worth of hula hoops to an architect? You get this:
One thousand PVC hula hoops have been used to make the Storefront Ring Dome Pavilion in Petrosino Park, in New York. The $3000 structure was built to mark the Storefront for Art and Architecture’s 25th anniversary, and was designed by Seoul-based practice Mass Studies.
The project arose from a chance encounter. “Storefront director Joseph Grima was travelling in Asia on business and saw a model of the dome in my office,” recalls project architect Minsuk Cho, a founding member of Mass Studies. Grima wanted a dome three times larger than the one in Cho’s design, but for roughly the same cost, so Cho used hula hoops and zip ties, and it was assembled by volunteers.