SOFT ROCK

aka. the art of the foam-cutter aesthetic

2018 | MIT SA+P | critic: Jennifer Leung

S00. THE SUBTITLE

Exaggerating the artificial: new landscapes of the picturesque

(aka. fake rocks)

S01. THE GROUND

Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of Central Park, also left his mark on Boston. The emerald necklace weaves its way across 1,100 acres of some odd combination of city and suburbs. It kisses industrial buildings, sweeps past large homes, deftly dances with highways. It seems almost an untouched avenue, like the gods of urban planning wouldn’t, or couldn’t, touch the little rivers and large ponds. Like the forested paths are remnants from before the shores were touched by the many migrants. But this veneer of a tabula rasa, the seeming purity, is an artifice all its own. The gentle rolling hills were sculpted, the plantings controlled. It is a picturesque project, designed for the ignorant romantic viewer.

FIGURE SR-01 | SITE PLAN, SOFT ROCK | THE EMERALD NECKLACE

FIGURE SR-01

S02. PEAK PERFORMANCE

So what space for performance inserts itself into a place that is performing so well on its own? The park is the player, and the audience doesn’t even realize it’s spectating a carefully scripted show with each crunch down the gravel paths and glance over a bridge’s edge.

FIGURE SR-02 + SR-03

FIGURE SR-02 + SR-03. [left]

THE BIRTH OF THE PRIMITIVE COLUMN

These illustrations map the evolution of the primitive column: The origin of the species as a stalactite and stalagmite slowly merging. Flat surfaces begin to infiltrate: they are some nod to an intervention, a crafted touch, unlikely to be an organic evolution.

The base and the capital flare with more clarity before an ornately carved interior peeks out from between them. It is an architectural interpretation of Michelangelo’s ‘Captives’ endlessly holding the line. These bundled columns become a steel I-beam, extruded and connected to its roughened concrete capitals, a crumbing or perhaps almost modernism.

Then a sheetrock-wrapped steel section labelled for what it came from and aspires to be: rock. A decorated shed rather than the subsequent duck.

The final stage is an ambiguity. It is no longer rock at all, and yet it evokes the original, the I-beam inside coated in spray foam until it is almost organic – strange growing plastic making dips and crags that you could almost see water dripping down, growing, chilling, stretching.

But it’s not. It’s not hard rock, it’s soft rock.

S03. PICTURESQUE+

Instead, perhaps, the park could perform more while seeming to not perform at all. And in this avenue of artifice there are some slippages, where its façade reveals itself to the careful watcher, the audience becoming aware of the performance unfolding.

A COLLECTION OF ROCKS*

S04. STAGED

So spaces for performance within this performance are carved out. Some for groups that might sing, their voices bouncing from some rocks* and being absorbed into others. Other places are for noticing: for watching the space and the people in the space and the city around the space.

SITE 01

SITE 02

SITE 03

S05. ARTIFICE

It can be eerie, this almost space, because sometimes the craggy surfaces are real and sometimes they are more than real. It is a picturesque where even the natural elements introduced are too unpredictable for the romantic follies, so this constructed reality edges towards complete control. And perhaps this new landscape, too, will one day be forgotten as artificial. The visitors will marvel at the carved voids and punctures in solid volumes, never guessing, never seeing, the 2x4 construction within painted and epoxied foam.

S06. SLIPPAGES

But for those that look, perhaps you will see the jiggle of a foam cutter chiseled from a boulder near the base, or the bubbles of spray form in a frozen simmer along the immense plinth, and you’ll peek behind the curtain of the picturesque park, and realize it has been performing for you all along.

S07. SOFT ROCK ON

And so none of it was hard rock, real rock, original rock. It was not blank slate. Instead rather it was soft rock - malleable, changeable, controllable, ready to take form and perform.

SECTION THROUGH SITE 01+02+03