Seth McDowell Architect, pllc

Socrates Sculpture Park and The Architectural League invited emerging architects and designers to submit proposals for Folly, an annual design/build studio program during the spring leading to a public exhibition at Socrates. Proposals were welcomed for full-scale projects and installations that thoughtfully use space, material, and/or process to create a physical experience. Folly 2015 was defined by several questions:

Is it folly to pursue an ideal?

Is it folly to expect the material world to follow the conceptual world, as it is intended through renderings, models, and ultimately a built space?

Is it folly to use an economy of means?

Is it folly to contradict a pre-existing space or strive to resonate within a site?

If a folly has no utilitarian purpose, is it sculpture?

Seth McDowell’s proposal, TurnStile Folly, is a folly you must touch, poke, pop and push.  It is a folly of motion.  It is a spatial turnstile of rotating, soft arms. TurnStile occupies space with material.  An eighteen by eighteen by nine-foot volume is filled with a grid of spinning bubble-wrapped arms. These arms trace the movement of a human body as it navigates the dense forest of translucent trees. Once you break the threshold of this folly you enter a blurred terrain where you must continuously swim through the pillow-scape. After a few steps inside, swimming is more like wading as a visual void is cut through the material field creating a compressed room that extends from one’s chest to the top of their head. An onlooker, viewing the folly from the outside would see only a floating torso within the space of the TurnStile. 

TurnStile deploys bubble-wrap as a primary building material. Taking advantage of this soft, light material from the packaging industry, the project extracts a material from the waste stream and redefines it with a new material and spatial logic.