FORTIFICATIONS
IN COLLABORATION WITH ANGELA BEALLOR
Angela Beallor (New York, NY) and I began collaborating on building forts in 2010. We were both fascinated by the way the word “fort” holds so many opposing cultural ideas, having been used to describe architectural traditions as wildly contrasting as military fortresses and kids’ hideouts. It's a word that can hold the experiences of nest-like protection and warfare in the same breath.
With that cross-over as our starting point, we build structures that draw from children’s forts (for their intimacy and specialness to those who inhabit them), military forts (for their ability to stake claim) and sacred spaces (for their defiance of ordinary time, space and expectation) to carve out space that protects rarefied practices and experiences.
To us, forts are a material answer to the basic question of what we value enough to defend. What we value enough to build fortifications around, so that what's inside can live and grow. The act of building (in particular for the two of us who started with no building experience) is not just about us claiming physical space through the creation of actual structures. It's also about re-claiming our innate human design intelligence through the physical act of trusting ourselves to know how to design, build and inhabit space.
We have built on sites in Cleveland, New York and Texas. You can check them out here.
With that cross-over as our starting point, we build structures that draw from children’s forts (for their intimacy and specialness to those who inhabit them), military forts (for their ability to stake claim) and sacred spaces (for their defiance of ordinary time, space and expectation) to carve out space that protects rarefied practices and experiences.
To us, forts are a material answer to the basic question of what we value enough to defend. What we value enough to build fortifications around, so that what's inside can live and grow. The act of building (in particular for the two of us who started with no building experience) is not just about us claiming physical space through the creation of actual structures. It's also about re-claiming our innate human design intelligence through the physical act of trusting ourselves to know how to design, build and inhabit space.
We have built on sites in Cleveland, New York and Texas. You can check them out here.