SuralArk / Austin + Mergold + Marc Krawitz

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Text description provided by the architects. Noah’s Ark, after it landed on Mount Ararat, became perhaps the first architectural folly – an imposing fanciful, yet purposeless structure: a boat with no water around, a house with no inhabitants, a simple hulking mass of a conflicted typology. Chosen from over 170 entries, SuralArk is an American vernacular interpretation of the original. Made of 2x6 lumber and vinyl siding, the SuralArk has its material origins in the American suburbia that is surprisingly close to NYC (incidentally, there is a vinyl sided house just across the street from the Socrates Park entrance) and its formal roots as a (discarded) upturned ship cast ashore. Whether this was once a house in Levittown now on its way to becoming a boat, or a new hybrid house-boat under construction on the shore of East River in anticipation of the next hurricane flood is not entirely clear. The visitor is invited inside, under the siding canopy, to contemplate the present horizon of Socrates Sculpture Park and NYC, the past, and perhaps, the forthcoming great floods.