Rendering of Installation in situ on hotel grounds.
KANTSAYWHERE: The Reef | North Adams, MA
The Reef is an interactive archive of human experience situated in the middle of the forest on the grounds of the TOURISTS hotel. As travelers visit, they add to, reorganize, and subtract from this collection of memories, creating a constantly shifting condition of space and mass that has as many possible forms as there are people who inhabit it.
This project was a four-person effort.
Site plan at local scale, depicting installation in North Adams neighborhood
For guests of TOURISTS, the experience begins even before arrival, when the guest is prompted to bring an object, a note, a thing that speaks to their life at the current moment (without explanation of why). Upon arrival, they find a strange metal polyhedron (a trapezoidal, rhomboid, or triangular prism) with a door for this object and a map with a location marked in the forest.
If the traveler chooses to participate, they make their way towards this marked location to find a large steel structure in a clearing, with ramps and staircases on all sides leading to its interior, where there appears to be a population of similar polyhedra. If the traveler enters, they find that the paths don’t all lead to a single interior space, but rather a variety of linear passageways that wrap around each other, overlapping and intersecting both visually (through the open structure of the walls and grated flooring) and spatially, with internal staircases connecting the otherwise separate paths.
Amidst wandering these paths (which ebb and flow in their interiority with the increasing and decreasing presence of these modules), the traveler begins pulling modules off the walls to see what others have left behind. There are postcards, letters, toys, books, clothing—seemingly anything that fits has been left in one of these polyhedral time capsules somewhere in the structure. At last, the traveler notices a particularly calling opening in the structure, and places their own capsule in the wall, for others to later discover.
Exploded axonometric of folly with nexus callout.
But this is hardly the end of the experience, for beyond the archival program, there is the space itself to interact with. In the twists and turns of the interior pathways, an exterior rich in spatial variety is created, with gathering places that vary in scale from scattered reading nooks to a mini-amphitheater in the center of the structure. There is little in the way of defined program, but that just makes it that much easier for the varying travelers to make it their own and find every possible way to interact with it.
Looking beyond the span of a single traveler’s visit to the lifespan of the folly itself, while the underlying structure may remain unchanged, its population keeps the folly alive and constantly changing. As the population of modules ebbs and flows (potentially curated by TOURISTS, potentially decreased by people looking for a souvenir, potentially even increased by counterfeiters wanting to add to the work), the experience of the space changes as well—one day a stretch might be picked bare, another day it might be completely enclosed; one day the structure is empty, the next a performance is scheduled. The folly is there to be interacted with, and when it comes down to it, the space will be used the way people choose to use it. And if one day a traveler returns, decades later, and opens an archive that contains their contribution from their previous visit, then that’s just another of the infinite possibilities of the space that has come to fruition.
Rendering of nexus point in center of folly structure.