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Created for the NYCxDesign Festival, FILTER carves out space for quiet recentering. FILTER is the result of a close collaborative process among100 craftsmen, engineers, and designers from nine North American firms. Designed as both an object and an ephemeral experience, the pavilion reorients toward the natural, rather than the manmade. The ellipsoid structure, comprised of steel fins surrounding reclaimed wooden seating and flooring with a live tree at the center, provides a contemplative space for meditation on one’s relationship with the natural world. For its first life in Times Square, FILTER offered a sancturary, filtering out the urban chaos and immersing visitors in solitude. Transported to Wyoming, it's now a focal point in a public park, enriching the community experience.
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Nestled in what was once the curve of a concrete on-ramp to the neighboring interstate, the adjoining site has been reclaimed as a public park by the city of Sheridan. Lush with trees and carved by a gentle creek and pedestrian paths, the park has become home to FILTER. Originally supplied and fabricated by EMIT, the ellipsoid of folded steel shards now carves out a piece of Wyoming sky, filtering the fresh nature of the newly reclaimed city park, rather than the cacophonous lights and energy of midtown Manhattan. The pavilion’s patina reflects the accumulations of both dry western air and East Coast salinity, the long process of making, as well as the various encounters of the public, drawing a network of community as well as a sense of place.
Each element of the structure was designed with attention to its sustainability, portability, and longevity, beyond the duration of NYCxDesign. The lightly-charred and textured timber elements were crafted from salvaged Glulam beams by Spearhead, sustainable wood technologists based in British Columbia. These components are systematized and structurally self-supporting. Following the closure of the NYCxDesign festival, the organic Exclamation Plane tree was donated to The Battery Conservancy, and the pavilion was carefully disassembled and transported back to Wyoming. FILTER has ignited an effort by EMIT and the Sheridan Arts Council to revitalize the park’s landscape with public art interventions, to be experienced for years to come.
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 architect translated this exercise into full-scale existence through a design composed of a series of standard-sized, half-inch hot-rolled steel plates, or “chaps,” arranged to form a 24-foot diameter, 20-foot-tall ellipsoid. FILTER, located in Times Square, appeared to be a foreign object. Fluid shards of naturally-weathered steel invite close inspection, and a gentle ramp leads around the perimeter, offering views of the space held within. 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.” A bench of reclaimed fir offcuts is folded into the interior, encircling a live, 20-foot-tall tree. The tree’s dense canopy only partially obscures the sky beyond, inviting occupants to look upward and lose themselves in contemplation. Now 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.
The homecoming to Sheridan, Wyoming is the final step in a long journey for the structure, having passed through the hands of craftspeople, designers, contractors, and assembly professionals from British Columbia, to Greeley, Colorado, to New York City. The pavilion’s patina reflects this long process of making as well as the various encounters of the public, drawing a network of community as well as a sense of place.
CLB is a cross-disciplinary design firm which pushes the growing edge of contemporary practice. Since their founding in Jackson, Wyoming in 1992, CLB has taken their frontier origins as a guiding ethos, mobilizing a uniquely holistic and place-inspired approach to projects spanning North America. Driven by an innate responsibility to people and place, and a desire to respond authentically to the conditions in which they practice their craft, CLB’s adept team of architecture and interior design professionals work to create environments that can elevate, enrich, and inspire. CLB’s highly-collaborative team includes 60 design professionals, working between studios in Bozeman, Montana and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, USA.
https://clbarchitects.com/proj...
