Star Talker
Location: Queens NY.
Award: Honorable Mention, Architectural League’s “Folly” Competition.
…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…
This proposal was an entry to the Architectural League’s annual competition for an architectural sculpture in Socrates Park, located at the far Western edge of Queens looking across the East River towards Manhattan. As it does every year, the brief asked for a proposal that explores the overlap between architecture and sculpture, framing the problem as a contemporary version of a “folly” – a fanciful and purposeless pavilion set in a park or garden – and intending to free architects from the usual constraints and manifest personal preoccupations and unfettered desires. I took the opportunity to explore the technical possibilities of beamed sunlight using heliostats – sun-tracking mirrored reflectors.
