LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- Socrates Sculpture Park and The Architectural League present Folly, a new residency and commission for emerging architects and designers to produce and exhibit a full-scale project at Socrates Sculpture Park. Socrates, in partnership with the League, established the residency to explore the intersections between architecture and sculpture and the increasing overlaps in references, materials, and fabrication techniques between the two disciplines.
Especially popular among the Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries, architectural follies are small-scale structures placed within a garden or landscape as a means to draw the eye to specific points or to frame a view. A folly-the name of which derives from the French folie, to mean “foolishness” or “madness”- often has no discernible purpose or function (hence its name), though it might sometimes provide seating or shelter. Follies were purposely eccentric or unusual, historical or stylistic foils to their immediate contexts, and in this way they were intended to incite the imagination and delight the eye. In playing with conventional ideas of function, form, and scale, the folly is an architectural typology that shares many similarities with contemporary sculpture and installation, making it a particularly apt theme for this new residency.
JEROME W HAFERD’S and K BRANDT KNAPP’S project, Curtain, was selected by a jury of architects and artists through an open call for proposals that invited emerging architects and designers to speculate on contemporary interpretations of the folly. The jury included: Alyson Baker, Executive Director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; Yolande Daniels, Studio SUMO; Richard Gluckman, Gluckman Mayner Architects; Christopher Leong, Leong Leong Architecture; and Leo Villareal, artist.
Jerome W Haferd is originally from Akron, Ohio. His academic and professional pursuits initially led him to several locales, including the Beijing offices of OMA and Zephyr Architects. He now works at Bernard Tschumi Architects in New York. K Brandt Knapp, a Baltimore native, currently works at Richard Meier and Partners in New York. She studied photography as well as architecture and has maintained a strong interest in the arts and teaching.
