Originally developed during an artist residency at MacDowell in 2013, this project emerged from a general interest in the architectural folly and garden grotto as ambiguous typologies situated between the disciplines of architecture, art, and landscape.

First exhibited for the group exhibition Potential Fields, organized and sponsored by CR10 Arts at the Clermont State Historic Site in Clermont, New York, the project was later presented at a conference at Syracuse University, exhibited at the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, and published in the book XXL-XS: New Directions in Ecological Design (Actar).

An outgrowth of a collaborative artist residency at MacDowell in 2013, Over/Under Ground is conceived as an architectural folly / garden grotto for an environmental age. Architectural historian Anthony Vidler writes that “as a vehicle for all sorts of fashionable literary notions, from the sublime to the picturesque, the folly exhibited them in a kind of museum of meditative objects.” Whether deployed in Florence’s Boboli Gardens in the sixteenth century or at Parc de la Villette hundreds of years later, the architectural folly provides a unique space for experimentation and theoretical inquiry.

Over/Under Ground was proposed for the peripheral edge of a typical sculpture park, an inherently ambiguous condition belonging neither exclusively to nature or culture. Such an edge condition necessarily serves as a zone of exchange between human and nonhuman forms of habitation and meaning, for which the folly provides a space of intensification as simultaneously a cultural object located within the sculpture park’s space of display, and a natural object / environment visually as well as ecologically linked to the tree line. In this way, the project functions simultaneously as architectural folly and garden grotto.

Tomorrows exhibition: http://tomorrows.sgt.gr/index.php?lang=en

Tomorrows exhibition catalog: http://tomorrows.sgt.gr/ebook.php?pid=119&lang=en

Tomorrows exhibition catalog PDF: http://tomorrows.sgt.gr/images/e-book/Tomorrows_Book_V_E_BOOK_SMALL.pdf

XXL-XS: New Directions in Ecological Design (Actar, 2017): http://actar.com/product/xxl-xs/

ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) 2015 Fall Conference Proceedings: https://www.acsa-arch.org/proceeding/between-the-autonomous-contingent-object-paper-proceedings/

Read more about the Anthropocene Folly in an essay by Chris Perry for Columbia University’s ARPA Journal: http://www.arpajournal.net/a-folly-for-the-anthropocene/