// The Fort //

By Michael Siano and Forrest Taylor

Fir, galvanized sheet, nails, rivets, cable

5.5’ x 5’ x 13’

2016

This sculpture is an effort to reconnect with a way of building and thinking that can be lost when we are taught “the right way of building.” Building forts allowed us to create and learn in ways that could never be offered in traditional learning environments. In school we are generally taught to do things in a handful of ways that foster rigid guidelines for doing almost everything. Michael and I were sitting on a pile of recycled building lumber thinking what we could do with it. We look at the work of Jackie Ferrara, Martin Puryear, Richard Deacon, Isamu Noguchi and Constantine Brancusi for inspiration. We wanted to work with a limited tool set and to do little measuring while putting together something from this pile of lumber, and to mediate an inside/outside experience.

How did we get here?

How have our styles of building changed?

How do the forts of our past influence the way we build now?

Forts encompassed all of our ideas and questions better than anything else. There are no wrong ways to build a fort, no codes to follow, no specific set of materials. We scavenged materials from wherever we could find them. The galvanized sheet metal that covers parts of the fort is made from cut up pieces of HVAC ductwork that were being thrown away. With so much material constantly being thrown away, the dumpsters and junk piles provide an abundance of fort material ripe for the picking.  All of our surroundings played a role in shaping the fort.