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The Architectural League and Socrates Sculpture Park present the winning proposal for the 2015 Folly Program—an annual juried competition targeted to early career architects and designers. Socrates Sculpture Park and The Architectural League launched the annual Folly Program in 2012 to explore the intersections and divergences between architecture and sculpture.

Cambridge and Philadelphia-based firm IK Studio won this year’s competition with their proposal, Torqueing Spheres, which transforms a series of intertwining, sculpted forms into a meandering curved folly that encourages social interaction. IK Studio’s proposal was selected from 126 submissions from around the world and reviewed by a jury of five architects and artists, including David Benjamin (The Living); Leslie Gill (Architect); Sheila Kennedy (Kennedy & Violich Architecture); Alyson Shotz (Artist); and Socrates Sculpture Park Executive Director John Hatfield.

Torqueing Spheres combines a simple concept—a straight line—with complex spherical pods which become deep, self-supporting chambers to create experiences for both the collective and the individual. To construct the voluminous curves of Torqueing Spheres, IK Studio has implemented a material technique that uses a cost-effective method of bending plywood while maintaining a system of control and delivery. By blending folly formalism with innovative material techniques, IK Studio plays off of traditional architectural geometries to create new construction spaces that allow for exploration.

About the Designers
IK Studio is a young design and research practice that engages material performance, adaptable tectonics, spatial interaction, and robotics within architecture and urbanism. The practice was established by Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim in parallel with their academic pursuits and teaching at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. In every project, IK Studio engages with multiple scales, establishing new forms of organization among immersive technologies and their relationships to design.

About Socrates Sculpture Park
For over 25 years Socrates Sculpture Park has been a model of public art production, community activism, and socially inspired place-making. Known for fostering experimental and visionary artworks, the park has exhibited more than 900 artists on its five waterfront acres, providing them financial and material resources and outdoor studio facilities to create large-scale artworks on-site. Open 365 days a year, the park also offers a full season of dynamic public programming – all free and open to the public

Support
Folly is a partnership of Socrates Sculpture Park and The Architectural League of New York. This program is funded, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. Socrates Sculpture Park’s Exhibition Program is also supported by the generosity of Bloomberg Philanthropies, Charina Endowment Fund, Mark di Suvero, Sidney E. Frank Foundation, Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, Agnes Gund, Lambent Foundation, Ivana Mestrovic, Plant Specialists, Shelley and Donald Rubin, Spacetime C. C., and Robert and Christine Stiller.

And special thanks goes to our public partners, including the City of New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio, Queens Borough President Melinda R. Katz, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, City Council Members Jimmy Van Bramer and Costa Constantinides, the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, Commissioner Mitchell Silver, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl.