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Brick Folly
New York, United States
Architecture League of New York
2013
12’-0” W x 12’-0” L x 12’-0” H
Steel cable, perforated brick
Dom Cheng, Ryan Love
Historically there has always been something of a contrivance or deceptiveness about the folly as an architectural type. Frequently we find it used as a vehicle for romantic escapism: images of ancient ruination mixed with visions of vernacular exoticism, designed deliberately as imperfect counterpoints to Palladian perfection.
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Medium:
Team:
Brick Folly
New York, United States
Architecture League of New York
2013
12’-0” W x 12’-0” L x 12’-0” H
Steel cable, perforated brick
Dom Cheng, Ryan Love
‘Florae’ is an improvisational wall drawing inspired by the phenomenon of ‘tropism’ or a biological organisms’ innate tendency for directional growth in response to an environmental stimulus in the absence of cognitive thought. The composition, which is generated from cross-hatching, creates an architectural scrim to filter both view and daylight.
Such images often spoke to a nostalgic longing for the “wholeness” of past civilizations, just as the contrived formlessness of the picturesque revealed something of nature’s lost “purity” (in the face of its rational cultivation). Indeed, as a “planned accident,” the folly has always lent itself to an ambiguous or contradictory definition. On the one hand, it stands as a deliberate appeal to “otherness”—to the strange or uncanny; on the other hand, it remains perfectly integrated in the routines and rituals of enlightened society.
This insight, in our view, is what distances the folly conceptually from its modern incarnation as the technologically-mediated “expo” pavilion. The folly in its contemporary expression should rather resist such exhibitionism for its own sake, attending instead to questions of built form from the standpoint of the contradictory or paradoxical.
The folly is the afterimage of Architecture.
