Socrates FOLLY

Honorable Mention entry to the Architectural League’s “Folly 2015” competition at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens.

The brief asked for an architectural sculpture to explore the overlap between architecture and sculpture, framing the problem as a contemporary “folly” – originally a fanciful and purposeless pavilion set in a park or garden – and intending to free architects from the usual constraints to manifest our personal preoccupations and unfettered desires. I took the opportunity to explore the technical possibilities of beamed sunlight using heliostats – sun-tracking mirrored reflectors.

“Star Talker”
…53 million years ago, a stream of photons was born. Departing star 322495, outward bound for intergalactic space, they bent the infinite void beyond time. In the summer of the year 29333, on the fourth planet from the sun, a perihelic interceptor reached up, and through the perfection of absolute chance, diverted them from their arc, down, down, down into the darkness of the terrestrial paradise. In their turn, reaching up, the eyes of the creatures below received, and better came to understand, the texture of photodromic interstellarosity, and thereby their own place upon the continuum of the cosmic plane…