Location: New York, NY, and Sheridan, WY
Size: 1,000 sq. ft. (site), 450 sq. ft. (building)
Category: Small Project
Created for Design Pavilion and the NYCxDesign Festival, FILTER carves out space for quiet recentering within the frenetic energy of Times Square. Designed as both a monumental object and an ephemeral experience, the pavilion establishes a new node in the heart of New York City’s urban fabric — reorienting that experience toward the natural rather than the man-made. Evoking the rugged Wyoming landscape from which it originates, FILTER draws the visitor into an engagement of its flowing folds of weathered steel and timber. At the pavilion’s center, a lone tree embodies the ecological cycles and serves as a counterpoint to Manhattan’s urbanity.
The pavilion’s chapel-like design facilitates a new understanding of place, providing each occupant the chance to explore their own relationship with the natural world. The structure’s concept began as a simple diagram — a folded sheet of paper, carefully sliced and able to stand on its own. The team translated this into full-scale existence through a design composed of standard-sized, half-inch hot-rolled steel plates, or “chaps,” arranged to form a 24-foot diameter, 20-foot-tall ellipsoid. The systematized and structurally self-supporting components were first sent to Colorado for test assembly, then disassembled and shipped to New York to be erected.
Fluid shards of naturally-weathered steel invite close inspection and a gentle ramp leads around the perimeter, offering views of the space held within. A bench of reclaimed fir offcuts is folded into the interior, encircling a live, 20-foot-tall tree. The tree’s canopy only partially obscures the sky beyond, inviting occupants to look upward and lose themselves in contemplation. The noise, bustling crowds and glaring lights of the city are filtered out, and the newly-centered visitor is left in solitude, inhabiting the urban “pause.”
Each element of the structure was designed with attention to its sustainability and portability beyond the duration of the NYCxDesign installation. Following the closure of the NYCxDesign festival, the tree was donated to the New York City non-profit The Battery Conservancy, and the pavilion was carefully disassembled and transported back to Wyoming to continue its life as a public sculpture at EMIT’s headquarters and enjoyed for generations to come. In its final resting point in Sheridan, FILTER’s patina reflects the accumulations of both dry western air and East Coast salinity. Forging connections across geography and intimately centered on occupant experience, FILTER makes a place of its own.
