Sheep

NEW YORK, NY, USA, 1993

The sheep continues the interest in animal figuration, bilateralism, elevation, and directionality but with a greater interest in the skeleton. Here, the structure is a multiple dwelling and a series of distinct units sit within a skeletal structure. The prosody of the solution depends on the way in which the units – or organs – interact with the frame in a process of evasion, deferral, engagement, and support. The elevation of the building on legs is, in part, due to its siting on an existing parking lot but the principle, as with the animal houses, is also derived from the spirit of piloti and the notional “light lie on the land” that comes from barely touching it. This relationship to architecture’s eternal dialectic of elevation and excavation – the cave versus the tree house – is an abiding problematic in any architect’s work.

Credits: Michael Sorkin, Kent Hikida