Collegiate Times

Tyler Rush, Emily Clark, Andrew Shafer, and Toni Alston work on their group's folly.

Second-year architecture student Tyler Rush rotated a wooden model slightly larger than a basketball in one hand. He explored the gaps in the cubic form made by numerous intersecting sticks. He smiled, saying the design looks like something from Star Wars.

Under the direction of visiting professor Paola Zellner, Rush and his classmates formed teams to create architectural “follies” as part of their course, The Art of Building. The four team follies will occupy Burchard Plaza this Thursday. Rush and his team’s Star Wars model will translate to a full-size version that approaches a height of 10 feet.

Zellner said the definition of a folly has changed over time. In 18th century English gardens, for example, a folly was often a literal rendition of a fortress or classic ruin that sat as an ornament in the
landscape.

“The way that we interpret it now is a playful construct that has no defined use,” Zellner said. “So without the burden or complexity of use or program, it opens up the freedom for true exploration of design.”
Second-year architecture student Becca Kallen added that the modern folly isn’t purely sculptural like some of its predecessors.

“It’s enhancing the setting that it’s in for the viewer,” she said, “and there can be different amounts of, I guess, interaction with the visitor.”

Kallen is part of another team that titled its folly “The Sixty.” Made of layers of 2-by-3-inch pieces of lumber, the folly is a 60-degree equilateral triangle when viewed head on. The Sixty, though, has pockets large enough in which a person could stand.

“I think we have dreams of it becoming something that you could maybe sit in,” Kallen said, “or something (like) that could happen.”

The student teams began crafting their follies through an exercise called “charretting,” which involves several sessions of fast-paced designing. Zellner would allot 30 minutes for each team to generate small models, which the entire class would then briefly discuss. Zellner capped the process at two hours.

Kallen said the time constraints of charretting were challenging.

“But that’s why I’m so glad that we started doing that,” she said, “because we should be able to switch and work slowly at times and work really fast other times.”

The charretting models were based on a list of eight words that Zellner asked the teams to explore. Each team adopted two of the words, which included terms like balance, rhythm, hierarchy and repetition.

“It was not about coming to a consensus of everybody agreeing what the word meant,” Zellner said, “but it was actually about expanding the definition or the interpretation of those words and the words in relationship to each other.”

But turning words into tangible objects, Kallen said, was frustrating. The Sixty is based on “modularity” and “flow.”

“I think the problem was because it’s so hard to translate it, you automatically translate it to the most obvious thing,” she said. “And then it’s like, well that’s stupid. I don’t want to see something that screams ‘flow.’”

But Zellner told Kallen that viewers aren’t expected to envision the words when they observe a folly. The words and other constraints, such as using only three products to construct the follies, are meant to lend the students insight into their own design methods.

“The product was like a pretext to do all of these things that I think are really valuable,” Zellner said.

The folly project, Rush said, has impacted his other design work. He’s become familiar with his team’s materials and their spatial capabilities.

“All my other stuff is starting to look the same,” he said, laughing. “It’s all something to do with sticks these days.”

Through the hands-on folly, Kallen now entertains the thought of working a stint with a contractor after graduation.

“I’m becoming a lot more aware that I want to be involved a lot more with the actual build process than I ever thought,” she said.

Though Zellner is an advocate of the follies, every second-year architecture professor that teaches The Art of Building has their own methods of approaching the class. Zellner said other classes analyze existing buildings in depth. The culmination of their studies might be replica drawings or smaller models of the buildings.

Rush said he hasn’t been envious of those students. The folly is an involved but unique project.

“I’m kind of proud of it,” he said. “We’re doing something that not everyone does in architecture school: build something full scale that you’ve taken from, ideally, a piece of paper.”

A version of this article appeared in the Apr 6 issue of the Collegiate Times.