Tomorrow, Kara Walker’s monumental installation in the Domino Sugar Factory, “A Subtlety” (or “The Marvelous Sugar Baby”) will be unveiled to the general public at the Domino Sugar Factory (sorry, you missed Creative Time’s preview dinner with folks like Chuck Close and Jenna Lyons of J. Crew, who played Hannah’s boss at GQ in Girls).
Before you get in line to see Walker’s 35-foot-tall, 75-foot-long sugar-coated sphinx (on display through July 6, Fridays from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 6 p.m.), watch the above video and be completely mesmerized by a Cooper Union student’s reimagination of the Domino site.
Derek Lange made the video while he was an architecture student at the school. At first glance it’s trippier than a game of Medieval Future (which sadly didn’t get funded), but the Derek & the Domino Factory blog accompanying the project offers some explanation: Lange isn’t telling Two Trees to scrap its current plan (which, after all, is a done deal) so much as he’s calling on the developer to integrate the refinery’s industrial elements into the park it plans to build.
Lange’s ideas include projecting footage of the factory’s life and death onto repurposed evaporation tanks, storage silos and boilers; sandwiching loose pipes and rusty machine parts between sheets of plastic in order to create walls and screens; and enclosing the refinery’s filter machine in a glass box to form a public pavilion. Perhaps the most interesting idea involves turning the site’s silos into a pier along the East River, from which images would be projected onto the buildings.
Play the video to have a look at all of these ideas in action. Can you say pipe dream?