Grotto

The grotto is an artificial structure or excavation made to resemble a cave. It is elaborately artificial. Against this theatrical backdrop, forbidden pleasures can occur: hidden and discovered, stolen and intimate.

location

Queens, New York

client

Finalist, Young Architecture Program, MoMA/PS1

year

2005

collaborators

Daniel Bosia, Arup AGU

area

Structural Engineering

The grotto found its heyday in eighteenth century English gardens, providing a dark and erotic narrative to the landscape gardener’s palette. This proposal for a summer pavilion takes advantage of the grotto’s essential feature: there is something to discover within, and that something is often wet.

Since the structural unit of a grotto is the boulder, the challenge of the project was to develop a set of modular boulders that combine in a way that defies a conventional sense of order.

Modular Boulders

The Grotto uses a combination of algorithms that transfers modularity from a Danzer tiling technique (a quasicrystalline structure) to a final set of four faceted boulders based on voronoi geometries. These four boulders fit together in a variety of ways. The result is a wildly ordered three-dimensional pattern that never repeats the same way twice.

Space is excavated out of the packed, non-repetitive, three-dimensional pattern to reveal the grotto within.