The folly is an architectural device with origins in 17th century picturesque landscape theory. As a genre of architecture that is halfway between a building and a sculpture, the purpose of the folly were two-fold: 1) to populate the ground with architectural stand-ins for the scenographic rendering of nature and 2) to serve as compositional objects that can draw the visitor’s eye across the horizontal plane of a seemingly endless landscape, much like a constellation of stars across the vast night sky. Composing architecture and nature through the pictorial plane of viewing was the primary means through which English landscape architects designed. To this end, the folly originates as an object of aesthetic theory, one designed to address the perception of the viewer as they move and orient themselves in nature.

While architecture and nature are typically understood as two distinct aesthetic forces (one linked to notions of originality, the other to notions of origination), the folly in its historic origins is an object vested with the possibility of synthesis. What kind of syntax can emerge out of the architecture’s geometric and material organization as it butts up against the orders of nature?
House of Multiples is not a proposal of an object within nature, but nature within the object, for a re-rendering of nature through the prismatic lens of architectural conceits. House of Multiples is the physical artifact of a representational system translated into material form.

IV.
House of
MULTIPLES
A SPECULATIVE
GREENHOUSE