Client: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis/St Paul Campus

Overview

The new Biomedical Discovery District, Cancer and Cardiovascular Research building is designed to foster innovation. The building and plaza is the physical place made ready for this ongoing activity of discovery. Adjacent Possible* is a poetic response to this invitation.
The sculptural work engages the architecture and landscape, mediating between the human experience of the plaza and the scale of the building. Massive blocks of granite play against a soaring stainless-steel web, growing according to its own internal logic, tracing and defining the space above the plaza, in an open-ended dance of curving linear pipe.
The new appears at the boundary where different conditions and perspectives meet. The creative, dynamic edge of biomedical research explores the interactions between biochemical, genetic, and environmental systems. Adjacent Possible embodies this sense of fertile ideas in play.
* Theoretical Biologist, Stuart Kauffman, generously allowed me to use his term as a title for this work. In his book Investigations (Oxford University Press, Inc. 2000), he postulates that life and environment co-construct the biosphere by continually moving into what he calls the adjacent possible-the new that is most possible given current conditions.

Goals

Engaging the architecture and landscape while mediating between the human experience of the entry plaza and the scale of the building. The new research building is designed to foster innovation. The building is the physical place made ready for this ongoing activity of discovery. Adjacent Possible is a poetic response to this invitation.

Process

The Plaza is the gate way for the new Biomedical Discovery District at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis/St Paul campus.
Collaboration for this work involved, several meetings with stake holders from the larger campus community, in addition to the project Architect, Landscape Architect, Construction contractor and building manager. The finished sculpture is original and iconic

Additional Information

Granite pavers and three large quarry artifacts, slightly altered, establish a sweeping field of movement through the plaza to the building. These suggest an energetic field of potential, existing just below our awareness, gradually appearing and taking form. The granite, cut from one of the oldest continental bedrocks known, provides an allusion to the geological fundament of all life and change on the planet.