Between Mist and Reality
Submission for Swamplands: Open Call at the Storefront for Art and Architecture
Collaboration with Michael J. Farris, Fred Horton, and Jyotindra Idris
2024This proposal engages climatic elements as a primary agent of architecture, transforming the Storefront for Art and Architecture into a space to observe and experience the relationships between the city and the elements of a swamp. By building out three hyper-humid rooms of varying sizes, this proposal searches for and aims to encapsulate the transitional nature of the swamplands.
Like the swamplands, which are neither totally land nor totally water, these rooms create soft boundaries between the natural and artificial. Blurring the relationship between inside and outside, these rooms provide a platform in which different social encounters may unfold. An interpretation of the ephemeral, this intervention aims to make sense of the foggy, humid, wet, and biodiverse nature of swamplands often hidden from our human experience.
Swamplands act as buffers between human expansion and untamed wilderness, transitional zones rich with contradictions and mystique. This proposal turns the building inside out, positioning the swamplands as a sensory experience from which to observe the dualities and ambiguities of New York City’s urban fabric. Like an imperfect translation, the ephemeral is evasive, yet it provides an opportunity to soften boundaries and question our relationship to the natural and built world.