Curtain, a Folly Proposal, Opens in New York this Saturday

Curtain, a new sculptural project by young architects Jerome Haferd and K. Brandt Knapp, will open this Saturday afternoon with a picnic at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens. Curtain is the winning entry in Folly, a recent competition hosted by the Architectural League and Socrates Sculpture Park that invited emerging architects and designers to propose contemporary interpretations of the architectural folly.

The architects will talk about their project on-site at 4pm. This event is free and open to all; no reservations are necessary. Complimentary hot dogs, hamburgers, and lemonade will be served while supplies last.

Curtain will be on view through October 21, 2012.

Project Description from the Architects:

Curtain is an object in the landscape as well as a mutable, spatial experience at close range. The invention of Curtain lies in the coupling of a ‘soft’ material to a rigid but playful underlying structure. The folly rests on a 25 square grid, with an inner 9 square enclosure that transforms via opening ‘beads’. There are only two primary components which make up the architecture; the curtain and its structure. The wooden structure follows a game of rise and fall and the beads provide enclosure. This armature forms a series of frames beginning with an 8’ high, rectilinear threshold at the front façade. The viewer experiences this entry moment as a faint, but powerful proscenium before passing through the frontage into an active space within. The grid of slender, wooden posts meets a triangulated canopy of equally thin, but sturdy wooden members.

The real fantasy of this proposed folly lies in the effect(s) created by the plastic chain-link, as it dances across this ghost-like shape in three dimensions. Neither truly hard or truly soft, the repetition of these floor-to-ceiling strands creates a means by which the same system is experienced in several different ways. The overall 25 square is a play between ‘curtain walls’ and fixed boundaries. Some are loose at the ground, while the remaining courses of chain-link are fixed and relatively static. The innermost nine-square becomes a destabilized zone; each side a potential opening. The operable partitions can be played with, pulled back, and passed through. This gives the otherwise rigid system its crucial transformative quality.