From now until January 4, New York City's Park Avenue Armory's 55,000 square feet has a standing pool of water. James Ewing
From now until January 4, New York City's Park Avenue Armory's 55,000 square feet has a standing pool of water.
The manmade flood is part of a new installation-meets-performance piece, Tears Become…Streams Become…. James Ewing
The manmade flood is part of a new installation-meets-performance piece, Tears Become…Streams Become….
It required some serious engineering: the Armory worked with Arup to turn the floor into a massive pond, and then build a new set of floorboards on top. James Ewing
It required some serious engineering: the Armory worked with Arup to turn the floor into a massive pond, and then build a new set of floorboards on top.
Come performance time, a series of nine pumps will add water that will rise .75 inches above the surface, pooling around the lone piano player. James Ewing
Come performance time, a series of nine pumps will add water that will rise .75 inches above the surface, pooling around the lone piano player.
The illusion is startling: even with less than one inch of standing water, the lighting and reflectivity make the pool look 100 feet deep. James Ewing
The illusion is startling: even with less than one inch of standing water, the lighting and reflectivity make the pool look 100 feet deep.
New York City’s Park Avenue Armory is flooding. Not because of a nor’easter or rising sea levels in Manhattan or anything like that—it’s for art. The Armory’s latest installation-meets-performance piece Tears Become…Streams Become…required its staff to slowly, over the course of a 10-minute piano piece, fill the 55,000 square feet of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall with a standing pool of water that would mirror the hall’s gilded ceilings.
“When artists get these visions it’s our job to build them,” says Rebecca Robertson, the President and Executive Producer of Park Avenue Armory. In this instance, the vision belongs to the Scottish video and installation artist Douglas Gordon. Gordon has lit a piano on fire before, but for Tears Become…Streams Become…, he’s resurrecting a personal memory: one time he saw a boy playing the piano, crying, and wiping away tears while he played. In this piece, however, French pianist Hélène Grimaud will play. And the tears won’t flow from her; they’ll seep up from the floor boards.
James Ewing
It goes without saying the Armory couldn’t just take a firehose and actually flood the Drill Hall. “We went through various ways of thinking, would you depress the floor? Would you raise the floor on the bottom?” Robertson says. The Armory took the problem to Arup, the architectural-engineering powerhouse, who designed a false floor to be built on top of the Drill Hall’s regular floor, which is being treated like a massive pond. By lining the area with a heavy pond liner and sealing it with a blowtorch, the Armory staff can keep four inches of standing water just below the manufactured floor’s surface. Come performance time, a series of nine pumps will add water that will rise .75 inches above the surface, pooling around the lone piano player.
Turning a historic industrial shed into a body of water invites some complications. For one thing, every inch of the floor had to be surveyed and leveled, so that uneven floorboards wouldn’t botch the illusion of water percolating up from below. Water also creates humidity—kryptonite to pianos. “The felt on the hammers will just absorb that moisture, so it’s very important for these beautiful Steinway pianos that we keep the humidity within a particular range,” Robertson says. This meant keeping the water at 55 degrees and the air at 70 degrees. If the weather in New York changed, the Armory team would get in touch with Arup right away.
Even with less than one inch of standing water in the massive Drill Hall, Robertson says the illusion is startling. “It’s so sharp and so perfect that it literally looks like you’re looking down over 100 feet into this structure. You could easily think you could easily dive into it,” she says. On the other hand, though, “we’ve had people come to the edge and get vertigo, and have to step back.”
Tears Become…Streams Become…will run until January 4, 2015.
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