Blind Spots

more info

Blind Spots

Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens NY

Blind Spots is a meditation on the mutability of the urban site: the continual shape-shifting of territory and terrain to assume a particular posture or to accommodate a specific structure – for the moment. This conception of site is a particularly apt frame of reference in considering Socrates Sculpture Park, where the landscape has historically been defined as both a work in progress and a work in itself. To stake out a site is to give it temporary qualities of geometry, orientation, interiority, and exclusivity; provisional conditions of an impermanent landscape. This is the nature of the urban site, and to resist rather than embrace this impermanence is perhaps the greatest folly of architecture today. Deployed in the park as a series of six unique iterations over the duration of its exhibition, Blind Spots describes the given site as a changing territory with a malleable footprint, from 767 SF – 1,406 SF. In each configuration, the cordon of the perimeter articulates a range of spaces (alternately inhabitable and inaccessible) while also functioning to regulate view, light, and communication between visitors and the site’s varied “interiors” through the localized control of aperture. At the same time, each of the six site iterations frames a dialogue with its surroundings, orienting the visitor towards the neighboring stand of trees, the river, the street, or the wider park.