The Urchin pavilion was made from recycled plastic chairs. It was designed by CODA architecture firm and was built in collaboration with Ithaca and Brooklyn.
Project's description: Urchin seeks to question the role of the everyday object: from the typical use that "allows" one to sit, to the aggregation that becomes like skin: the properties of an object are no longer understood in terms of their use (legs, arms, seat), but in terms of vision of their shape (thorns, curves, voids), because due to their rotation from the earth, they lose contact with the human body.
When the statue of AD White dips down, the pavilion opens up and lets in the seated figure of one of Cornell University's founders. This person is in the circus, which is impossible, because it doesn't exist in reality.
Urchin doesn't damage any chairs during the making of the sculpture - they will be returned to use afterwards. Urchin plays with the question of usefulness and uselessness by manipulating a simple chair. This has the effect of changing our perception of the chair and the connections between our bodies, the chair's components and their orientations. The question of use as a primary perceptual phenomenon is a product of James J. Gibson's Theory of Affordances in his Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. The project aims to stimulate the questioning of usefulness and perception from the scale of the individual chair unit to the scale of the pavilion.
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