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Four Winds of the World

1994-

Four Winds
Four Winds
Four Winds
Four Winds
Four Winds
Four Winds
Four Winds
Four Winds

Description

At Queens College, the student body reflects the cultural diversity of New York City. Students bring with them traditions from all over the world, and I wanted to celebrate that in my design. I took for my theme global mythologies related to the four cardinal directions, or the four winds. The site was a circular paved area next to Klapper Hall surrounded by a low wall broken by six walkways. This seemed a perfect opportunity to create an outdoor plaza that would invite students to gather during lunch and between classes.

To create seating opportunities, I designed cut and welded steel panels to be affixed to the back of each low wall, transforming them into seats. I incorporated mythological imagery from around the world into the seat back design for each cardinal direction. Among the nineteen mythological figures depicted are a Navajo pollen figure, a bull from Chaldea, and a dragon from China representing the East; a sunset-coiled serpent from Zaire, a baboon-headed god from Egypt, and a house glyph from the Aztecs representing the West. Each image is silhouetted against a colored glass lozenge and set into a horizontally flowing design recalling rolling wind-blown cloud forms.  

For the plaza’s central focal point, I created a cut and welded metal sculpture on a base patterned with concentric circles, with key tiles indicating North, South, East, and West. This faux fountain is inspired by a creation myth, shared by the Japanese and the Hopi, that tells of life beginning when ants climbed out of the center of the earth. 

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