The architectural firm EASTON + COMBS presents a gallery exhibition of studies and 3D models titled MIRAGE GARDEN.
Headed by Co-Founders and Principal Architects Lonn Combs and Rona Easton, with Michael Stradley on the design team, the exhibition is a precursor to MIRAGE GARDEN, an architectural project formed as a reflective ribbon wall coursing through the landscape. The exhibition at Art Omi presents some of these early drawings and models of MIRAGE GARDEN, which is intended to explore degrees of the "natural" by intervening at the boundary between the unkempt edge of the forest and the subtly manicured spaces of the Art Omi: Architecture fields.
MIRAGE GARDEN will be created from vacuum-formed black polycarbonate using 3D printing technologies. The ribbon wall would separate the viewer from an interior space, perhaps enclosing a garden or an eco-experiment in contained wilderness. A series of opening in the porous wall would make the interior visible, but inaccessible. Combs describes it as a "boundary condition" similar to the controlled aesthetic of a Japanese or English garden that you are allowed to look at but aren't allowed to enter.
This is Art Omi: Architecture's first traditional experiment using drawing and modeling poised towards the reality of an architectural piece. Nestled within the campus of the Art Omi, Architecture Fields 01 + 02 offer a pristine 60-acre site designated expressly to foster and cultivate the production of physical installations such as pavilions, earthworks, landscape interventions, constructed environments. In addition, the program encourages the integration of all varieties of related media, ideas, propositions and theoretical musings in a laboratory-style setting.
EASTON+COMBS is an award winning, internationally recognized architectural office focused on innovative building strategies through the convergence of material practice, digital methodology and applied architectural research. Awards include the Architecture League's "League Prize" in 2008, MoMA's Young Architecture Program in 2010, and NYS Council on the Arts grant in 2011. The firm received design merit awards from the AIA New York Chapter for 2010, 2011 and 2012. In 2010 the firm was awarded with the "highest honor" in the biannual New Practices New York competition recognizing important emerging practices in New York City.