Brooklyn Museum’s Great Hall - New design by Situ studio

Situ Studio transformed the traditional columns in the Great Hall of the Brooklyn Museum by covering them in white acrylic fabric stretched over hoop frames.

“We all have our favorite one,” Wes Rozen muses, referring to the field of columns in theBrooklyn Museum’s Great Hall, which he and his colleagues in the design firm Situ Studio have turned into fabric-covered, warped and twisted versions of their Beaux-Arts originals, complete with integrated seating. The installation, “reOrder: An Architectural Environment by Situ Studio,” opens to the public on Saturday and is part enchanted forest and part architectural debutantes’ ball, in which the structural elements appear to start dancing through the otherwise static space. (The designers also credit the museum’s 19th-century costume collection as inspiration for their crinoline-like structures.)

Situ Studio was founded in 2005 by five Cooper Union graduates who first made a name for themselves with their unusual approach to building techniques and technology, and their large in-house laboratory for material experimentation. Once known as the go-to firm for commissioned fabrication of models or installations (for clients like the artist Sarah Oppenheimer and the architects Diller Scofidio & Renfro), Situ Studio now devotes at least half of its time to its own projects. One of them was the Solar Pavilions, a series of lightweight sustainable temporary structures designed between 2006 and 2009 forSolar One, New York’s first green-energy arts and education center. It was during an installation at Miami’s Scope art fair that Solar Pavilion II caught the eye of the Brooklyn Museum’s director, Arnold Lehman. He later asked the designers whether they wanted to be the first to do a site-specific installation in the museum’s newly renovated Great Hall, which was designed in 1895.

After more than a year of planning “reOrder,” Situ Studio has now spent the past four weeks on site, almost around the clock, overseeing 20 workers and using over 2,200 yards of white acrylic fabric to fold and pleat over giant hoop rings that encircle a total of 16 24-foot-tall columns. The designers documented the construction with a camera that moved 700 feet over three weeks, taking one photograph every two minutes and compiling 200 hours of installation work. The serious, heavy-duty nature of the construction shown in their video is impressive. Yet as one stands amid the final installation, one sees nothing but a magically sylvan sculpture park, light and airy and lit from within by hundreds of L.E.D. lights. It’s easy to follow Rozen’s lead as he imagines dance performances and concerts to be staged in the transformed space; there should be plenty of opportunities for that before “reOrder” is taken down in January 2012, and the Great Hall returns to its far less fluid former self.