When Brooklyn-based design and fabrication shop Situ Studio was installing reOrder at the Brooklyn Museum in late February, it looked as though their team was fashioning enormous Victorian skirts for the classical columns in the McKim, Mead & White'designed Great Hall. Up on scaffolding and scissor lifts, they fussed with plywood hoops and precise folds of canvas. Each unique form emits a glow from rectangular LEDs, and the bases of 11 of 16 columns are fitted with exaggerated molding.

“We wanted to break away from the symmetry and the grid of the space,” says Westley Rozen, one of Situ Studio’s five founding partners. The partners met at Cooper Union and started the firm in 2005. reOrder continues the museum’s transformation of the early-20th-century Great Hall, located at the center of the ground floor, into a space that is better suited for exhibitions, performances, and hanging out. Ennead Architects led the design of the renovation, which includes four freestanding gallery walls.