The National Building Museum’s season-long Summer Block Parties began seven years ago and were the brainchild of its staff, who sought exciting new ways to engage the public. In recent years, the Great Hall became a venue for architecture firms to create interactive summer exhibitions. The LAB at Rockwell Group continues this tradition with its Summer 2019 installation, Lawn.
The LAB atRockwell Group’s concept, Lawn, celebrates and explores the public and private identities of a lawn as an iconic communal space for interaction and performance. We asked ourselves, how does one create a lawn indoors that would inspire people to share stories, make memories, and daydream?
Our installation is a vast, sloping greenspace that consumes the first two bays of the Museum’s Great Hall, complete with an interactive soundscape and hammocks suspended from the 100-foot-tall ceiling. Lawn games, an AR firefly hunt, and all day programming have been conceived to unite strangers through collective quintessential memories and rituals of summer.
An observation deck allows guests to view both the lawn and the building itself from a vantage point never before available to the public, 53 feet above ground level.
Lawn allows guests to unwind with quintessential summer activities while connecting to the design of the Museum. In the Great Hall, the LAB has inserted a sloping lawn in the first two bays, supporting the expansive carpet on a scaffolding superstructure.
The ticketing area features a building-scale mural of the sky, containing a dimensional title treatment set against a pixelated cloudscape made up of classic summertime iconography. The floor mirrors the cloudscape, with a pixelated image created from custom-dyed carpet tiles. A number of park benches provide seating.
Arriving at the base of the lawn, guests are met with a green expanse, set on a graceful incline and dotted with clusters of communal lounging areas. The centerpiece of these lounging areas are interactive hammocks suspended from the ceiling grid.
The hammocks contain hidden speakers programmed with pre-recorded audio from prominent American storytellers, sharing summertime memories. The clusters also include Adirondack chairs and picnic blankets. All furnishings and structures are rendered in a custom painted blue gradient.
The entire lawn is bathed in a soundscape of distilled audio elements that evoke time spent outdoors on a warm summer day: crickets chirping, bees buzzing, a lawnmower whirring in the distance.
Adding to the auditory experience is the rush of water emanating from the Great Hall’s existing fountain, which, as guests make their way up the lawn and past the first set of columns, is visible through a viewing portal open to the floor below.
Surrounding the portal is an array of activities, structures, and additional lawn furniture. Among these offerings are: a lemonade stand, a popsicle stand, and a selection of lawn games.
Past the portal, guests have the opportunity to climb a scaffolding tower up to the observation deck, which boasts never-before-seen views of the Museum’s elaborate architectural detailing and the vista of the lawn and activity below.
