Willow

Within his academic background Marc Fornes has taught design studios and seminars at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Columbia University in New York, Harvard University in Cambridge, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Die Angewandte in Vienna. He has led many workshops and served as a guest critic at several institutions such as the Architectural Association in London, The Royal College of Art in London, Pratt Institute in New York, the University of Pennsylvania, and Ball State University. In 2007 Marc Fornes produced & curated ‘Scriptedbypurpose’, the first exhibition exclusively focusing on scripted processes within design, and recently curated the European section for the Architecture Biennale 2008 in Beijing.

Willow is a celebration of artistic, architectural, and mathematic disciplines. Artist Marc Fornes describes the sculpture as an “architectural folly,” evoking the decorative, but generally non-practical structures that adorned the great estates of Europe in the 18th & 19th centuries. As a structure, it explores the concept of lightweight, self-supporting elements generated through computations of form and structure as well as descriptive geometry. The use of these processes unifies all elements of the sculpture – its structure, skin and ornamentation – into a single unified system. From a distance, the sculpture’s colours seem to meld seamlessly into one another. Up close, the surface is revealed as an intricate assembly of coloured structural shingles. Although similar, each digitally fabricated strip is unique. The shingles overlap each other creating a strong and thick, but delicate-looking structure. Willow’s colors originated in its immediate natural environment. The artist, realizing the sculpture’s potential as an iconic destination within Borden Park, pushed the hues toward artificiality. The greens and blues blend into a synthetic magenta, imbuing the sculpture with the appearance of motion. Willow’s colour, shape and tracery of light and shadow invite the passerby to stop, explore and play within. BITS AND PARTS: Willow is comprised of 721 aluminum stripes, 14,043 connectors (1/4” aluminum rivets) and 60 epoxy concrete anchors. The aluminum (5052 type) is used in three different thicknesses: 1/8” (3mm) stripes, 1/4” (6mm) at the feet, and 1/2” (10mm) for the 24 base plates that are anchored to a concrete pad of 240 cubic feet.. It took four days, and a crew of 4 to assemble the prefabricated parts.