mcdowellespinosa architects

TurnStile Folly is a folly you must touch, poke, pop and push.  It is a folly of motion.  It is a spatial turnstile of rotating, soft arms. TurnStile occupies space with material.  An eighteen by eighteen by nine-foot volume is filled with a grid of spinning bubble-wapped arms.  These arms trace the movement of a human body as it navigates the dense forest of translucent trees. Once you break the threshold of this folly you enter a blurred terrain where you must continuously swim through the pillow-scape. After a few steps inside, swimming is more like wading as a visual void is cut through the material field creating a compressed room that extends from one’s chest to the top of their head. An onlooker, viewing the folly from the outside would see only a floating torso within the space of the TurnStile. 

​

TurnStile deploys bubble-wrap as a primary building material.  Taking advantage of this soft, light material from the packaging industry, the project extracts a material from the waste stream and redefines it with a new material and spatial logic.