"NOOKS" for Dome Colony X

2009 - New York, NY, USA

"NOOKS" for Dome Colony X

New York, NY, USA

CLIENT Fritz Heag, Dome Colony X at San Gabriels at X INITIATIVE / STATUS On Exhibit 2009 / DESIGN TEAM Balmori Associates

Two critical parts of public space use need a fresh look: the places and ways of sitting in it, and the places and ways of walking on it. We have become very interested in playing with these elements and the piece that we produced for the “Dome Colony in the San Gabriel’s“, for Fritz Haeg’s two month long exhibition at the X Initiative Art Space was a way of playing with seating and planting. Envisioned as dynamic space and furniture piece; in form, it is a garden that engages the Colony. It is not only designed for visitors to move and play with, it is a social community space that invites them to linger, and just be. Can you work with some units for seating which people can assemble themselves (varying the height closeness to others etc.)? Using this as a premise the units allow you to make nooks where one person can be alone, or some can be for two or a large group. We named the experiment “nooks” for this reason.

The secondary idea grafted on this was if plants could be incorporated into the system. This time they are shown conceptually by providing paper flowers that people can plant in the space. The Garden narrates a story of landscape taking over and expanding over the Public Space, therefore changing the way that the space is perceived and read by the user. The users that “plant” flowers in it, transform it with time.