Two Follies In The Garden Of Manhattan Bridge:

ICONOCLASH - Infrastructure & Monument

Instructor: Ferda Kolatan

Team: Tuo Chen, Hongbang Chen

Fall 2021

The project is about providing a new type of 21st-century garden with follies on Manhattan Bridge. We choose garden with follies as our program because there are clashes between the fictional and the real, the historical and the contemporary, the natural and the cultural, already embedded in these two 20th century follies themselves. Today, the existence of these two past-monumental structures creates problems and contradictions to the site which no longer values their monumentality. The design intention is to turn the confrontation of these two icons into a contemporary garden, allowing visitors to wander among the nontraditional and unusual nature, colliding with the urban background.

The Arch and Colonnade Folly is intimate, lush, intricate, and tranquil. In contrast, the Highway Folly is bold and grand in a contemporary way that almost touches but still stands a distance from its neighbor. Visitors first drift into an enclosed dark and mossy planting space underneath the highway surface after they leave the first folly. The gap between these two follies is tensional. The end of the folly evokes a sense of questioning to its visitors, questioning the relationships between the bridge and the arch, the infrastructure, and the ornament, the precious and the mundane. The hybridized architecture flips the coin of the typical definition of these dichotomies through its spatial and formal powers to proclaim new contemporary aesthetics and culture.