Project Information
Name of the project: Animate Sensate: A Plush Toy Collection
Architects: The Bittertang Farm
Year (project): 2009
Exhibition: Architectural League of New York, Young Architects Prize, 2010
Our Plush Toy Collection merges the Victorian Era’s hunger for swollen pillows, upholstery and other additive pleasure components with the Age of Exploration’s rapid discovery and documentation of strange new exotic beasts and environments. If the Victorian era was seen as an era crammed with overstuffed furniture obscuring structure and bones producing ominous environments then that furniture cannot be separated from the mood established nor can one ignore the influence that they would have on the mood of the architect. In a similar way explorations and the discovery of the New World’s flora and fauna influenced Baroque and Rococo spatial and material culture, with spaces expanding and walls encrusted with newly discovered organic materials. Careful and articulate analysis and storytelling of these beautiful new creatures influenced Baroque and Rococo spatial and material culture. With our plush toys, by creating new species with specific habits, habitats, motion and emotions we intend to both produce mood altering artifacts with personality as well as influence our spatial attitudes.
This ongoing work is geared towards critiquing architectural production at multiple levels. Firstly the stuffed toys are components of a larger manufactured ecosystem which begins to relate narrative and atmosphere. By starting with a character we are allowed to design environments around each species dismantling our preconceived ideas of space, adjacency and atmosphere. Then when placing physical representations of these species into our environment they radically transform our environment. Secondly the individual production of each character will produce new notions of tectonics that are geared not toward architectural self-reflection but towards specific aesthetic, stylistic and narrative goals. We are excited by the potential that exists tectonically with research into the relationship between skin (including hair, pimples, orifices, etc.), stuffing (muscle), bone and appendage. Thirdly the toys being sensate characters push experimental materiality and its representation to another realm not often achievable in architecture. Ideas of motion, personality, emotion and flexibility will be conveyed through supple 2-d articulation.
