In 2000 Pablo Castro and Jennifer Lee left the practice of Steven Holl to set up their own studio, Obra Architects. Since then, in just six years of work, the half Argentinean, half American team has curated an exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design with the ambitious title “Architettura Povera”, completed a villa in San Juan in Argentina, nicknamed poetically the “house of multiple horizons”, designed a memorial park in Pretoria, South Afric and a villa at Southampton, on the Atlantic coast of New York.

Their most recent work opens in July on Long Island and although it only lasts the summer, offers a solution that is so perfect in its simplicity that it seems destined to have other future applications. It is a new temporary pavilion for P.S.1, part of MoMA, that each summer invites a number of young talents to invent a new way to exploit the courtyard of the museum to host a packed programme of musical performances. A budget of 70,000 dollars is available for building it.

Obra Architects’ design “Beatfuse”, is a soft and fluid series of roofs supported on a curved timber structure that creates three enclosed spaces. Each of these, like a Turkish hammam, will have a different temperature: a frigidarium offers relief from the torrid New York summer, a caldarium and tepidarium will provide evocative atmospheres with steam and heat. The design is based on the use of reflective and insulating Radiant Guard™ panels. Initially developed by NASA to create a thermal barrier for astronauts spacesuits, the panels reflect 95 percent of radiant heat.

Shortlisted alongside Obra were designs by Contemporary Architecture Practice (New York), Gnuform (Los Angeles), Howeler+Yoon (Boston), Sotamaa Architecture & Design (Columbus). E.S.