Created for Design Pavilion and the NYCxDesign Festival, FILTER carves out space for quiet recentering within the frenetic energy of Times Square. Designed as both a monumental object and an ephemeral experience, the pavilion establishes a new node in the heart of New York City’s urban fabric – reorienting that experience toward the natural, rather than the man-made. Evoking the rugged Wyoming landscape from which it originates, FILTER draws the visitor into an engagement of its flowing folds of weathered steel and timber. At the pavilion’s center, a lone tree embodies the ecological cycles and serves as a counterpoint to the Manhattan’s urbanity.

Designed by CLB Architects, the pavilion’s chapel-like design facilitates a new understanding of place, providing each occupant the chance to explore their own relationship with the natural world. The structure’s concept began as a simple diagram – a folded sheet of paper, carefully sliced, and able to stand on its own. Eric Logan, Partner at CLB, translated this exercise into full-scale existence through a design composed of a series of standard-sized, half-inch hot-rolled steel plates, or “chaps,” arranged to form a 24-foot diameter, 20-foot-tall ellipsoid.

▼装置轴测分解图，Axon exploded ©CLB Architects

FILTER, located between West 46th and 47th Streets at Times Square, appears to be a foreign object. Fluid shards of naturally-weathered steel invite close inspection, and a gentle ramp leads around the perimeter, offering views of the space held within. The noise, bustling crowds, and glaring lights of the city are filtered out, and the newly-centered visitor is left in solitude, inhabiting the urban “pause.” As Logan explains, the structure presents “an offering, it [FILTER] changes the environment and creates its own.” A bench of reclaimed fir offcuts is folded into the interior, encircling a live, 20-foot-tall tree. The tree’s dense canopy only partially obscures the sky beyond, inviting occupants to look upward and lose themselves in contemplation.

▼动感的耐候钢片吸引人们前来观看，Fluid shards of naturally-weathered steel invite close inspection ©Leonid Furmansky

▼装置外边缘环绕缓坡，A gentle ramp leads around the perimeter ©Leonid Furmansky