The tradition of architecture is littered with attempts to combine the Sphere and the Tower into a unified inhabitable form. Many of these configurations seek a conflation between the authoritarian dominance that the Tower implies and the egalitarian bias of the Sphere’s ergonomic plane.
It is a game that the pioneers of representative democracy might recognise. The implication is that all the people of the world will join hands in a great big circle and collectively marvel at the designer’s centrepiece.
Taking this tradition as a starting point, I took the opportunity of a summer residency with Tomma Rum and LKAB in Malmberget, Sweden to build a full-scale, working prototype for a meeting place that could be re-arranged to serve a wide variety of socio-dynamical encounters. Drawing on concepts that I’ve been developing in smaller scale sculptures and maquettes, the structure is recyclable, re-locatable, modular and can easily be constructed from raw materials by two people in two days. It also facilitates an incredibly versatile array of uses.
I feel that this project has succeeded in tying together many older areas of my work and opening up a few new ones. It has also led to the invention of the sport Tower Ball, which offers a perfect solution to the mediation of human decision making through the architectural conjunction of the Sphere and the Tower.
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