Orogeny

Flushing Meadows Park has come a long way since its days as the Corona Ash Heap - no longer the “certain desolate area” vividly described in The Great Gatsby, it is a truly multipurpose crossroads serving the most diverse population of a bubbling borough. When one looks at a map of the park today, the variety of usage is graphically clear before you ever step foot on the grass. Roads, footpaths, museums, theaters, playgrounds, sporting fields, lakes, architectural relics, a subway station, a stadium, the occasional art installation - and that is just considering it in the immediate now. We wanted to graphically explore the history of the land, and the accumulations and erosions of its character over time. We have drawn inspiration from historical maps of the area (horizontal) and the aesthetics of geological core samples (vertical). Water (Meadow Lake, Flushing Creek) and ash (the Corona Ash Heap) both have tidal qualities of movement, buffeted by wind, gravity, and humans. We are interested in the history of continuous change in the Park, marked by moments of perceived permanence (the Worlds’ Fair, the next Worlds’ Fair, the parking lot, the potential casino) that inevitably gave way to evolution. Change is constant, but everything that passes through leaves a mark. 

Putting these impulses into our furnace, we have emerged with an assemblage of core samples, extracted from history into the light of the present. Our geological layers will reflect the past identities of the land we now know as the Park, translucent and refractive materials to converse with the natural and human light of the present. In practical terms, we plan to create an orogeny of cores, centered around a trio collapsed against each other, and surrounded by the “breakages” of that collapse.