Flow

ArtScience Collaborative (ASC = "ask)
Karen McCoy and Don Wilkison, Hydrologist, for In Situ at Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri, 1998, native limestone laid in dry stone technique, site approximately 1 acre, central open spiral - 15 ' diameter x 17'L x 20" average width and 17" H in seating area, lintel forms with channel 25'L x 3'W x 1' H, boulders marking water flow, various lengths. Dedicated to the memory Eddie Vanderfrift, stonemason.

FLOW draws the parallel between the accumulation of knowledge and other natural systems. The project celebrates building with indigenous materials, from an historical, geological and ecological perspective.  Sited at the Kansas City Art Institute, an acknowledged educational community, FLOW also engages a less recognized system - the campus hydrology.  The central form, a low circular, open-spiral limestone wall, functions as a gathering place for the exchange of ideas.  The central spiral (now the only part extant) was joined by other stone forms that traced the flow of water draining from the campus watershed and into the larger water system of Kansas City.  FLOW is as much concerned with catalyzing a dialogue about relationships between parts of a system, cause and effect, as it is with physical form.