Dymaxion Sleep by Jane Hutton & Adrian Blackwell
Landscape Architecture: Jane Hutton & Adrian Blackwell
Collaborator: Walter Blackwell
Location: Metis Garden Festival
Years of exhibition: 2009, 2010, 2011
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Dymaxion Sleep is a structure of nets suspended over a field of aromatic plants. Rather than walking through the garden, visitors lie on top of it, translating the typically solitary experience of a garden into a public event. The structure that holds the nets is an unfolded icosahedron, formed of twenty steel triangles. Each triangle is large enough to support a single outstretched body, an intertwined pair, or a pileup of people. The structure is anchored to a timber footing which traces the diagram of the icosahedron on the soil. Mints, lemon geranium, lavender and fennel are planted below, mimicking the structure’s topography and defining scented territories in which to relax.
The form of each layer of this double surface, planting and nets, is based on Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World Map. If Fuller’s Map reconfigured standard political representations of the world by refusing to define a fixed orientation, Dymaxion Sleep sets up a surface on which to lounge in undefined ways. Dymaxion Sleep takes its name from the title of a 1943 Time magazine article which describes Fuller’s regimen of polyphasic sleep – thirty minutes asleep, followed by six waking hours – a reconfiguration he used to dynamically maximize his body’s productivity. Our Dymaxion Sleep subverts Fuller’s focus on efficiency and work and instead maximizes the garden as a space for pleasure and dreams.
