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Passers-by observing what's going on down on Paul Robeson Place about halfway between Witherspoon and Chambers streets might rightly assume that the construction site atop of a vacant lot is soon to be home to luxury condos.
Wrong: it's Quark Park, the much-anticipated follow-up to 2004's Writers Block, but this time pairs noted architects, artists, and sculptors, with 11 equally noted scientists to create installations whose designs are based on highly scientific concepts.
And it is true, if you are not wholly familiar with orogeny, plasma physics, genomics, computational geometry, you do have to see it (or in the case of psychoacoustics, you have to hear it) to believe it.
When everything is complete, you'll be able to play nature's music through hyper-sensitive amplification on a set of granite columns, see how mountain ranges form, learn about robotics, genetics, fusion, El Niņo, and, yes, mouse nares, all in what was a small vacant lot at the rear of Palmer Square.
It's as if the Franklin Institute opened a satellite gallery in Princeton, and a whole lot of artists were invited.
In 2004, architect Kevin Wilkes, and landscape architects Peter Soderman and Alan Goodheart spearheaded a project with a concept that was foreign to many: a garden of follies (garden structures) whose design aimed to reflect or represent the writings of some of Princeton's best known authors: James McPherson, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Benchley, and Paul Krugman, to name a few.
Now it's two years later, there's a little more of a buzz with this project, and, said Mr. Wilkes, there's a whole lot more willingness—for whatever reason—to engage in real collaborative efforts.
"There were some writers in 2004 who were all about that project, but we also ended up talking to a lot of assistants.' The scientists however, while I'm sure they have better stuff to do, are hanging out here."
Jim Sturm, a Princeton University professor of Engineering and Applied Science as well as the director of PRISM (Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials), was out at Quark Park late Thursday night as his installation, whose concept was also inspired by University President Shirley Tilghman (herself a professor of molecular biology) was being illuminated for evening display. The piece, designed by Jersey City sculptor Nancy Cohen, examines how mice perceive smell. Indeed, the installation is an exquisite abstraction of a mouse's nostrils, as odor particles are randomly inhaled, and then sorted out (for visual's sake, by color) so the brain can process the smell.
Did we mention the whole thing lights up at night?
On first glance, the sculpture looks like a small, partially inflated hot air balloon resting on its side. But a closer look reveals a series of colorful plastic "buttons" representing cells programmed to mimic a specific type of odor. Each button is wired toward corresponding receptors within the nose, that, when it's dark and you're least expecting it, flash randomly, illustrating the workings of the olfactory senses.
What is equally impressive, however, is Ms. Cohen's ability to rattle off the workings of the olfactory system without even a second thought: a product of her collaboration with Dr. Tilghman and Prof. Sturm.
"After talking about Shirley's work in her field and my work in mine, and after she looked at my work, she showed me microscopic images that she thought I might find visually interesting and that were scientifically significant," Ms. Cohen said. After making some models of what an installation looked like and after spending significant time "at the lab" and hours talking out the idea, the team had something it could work with. Subsequently, the odor-related installation was one of the first to appear in the as-yet-completed park.
Prof. Sturm came up with the lighting concepts and wiring, making for an "exciting" project, Ms. Cohen said. "I've done collaborations before, but only with other people in the arts, so to have the ideas come from people as interesting as these two was totally new," she said. "They think differently than I do."
That installation is also landscaped by Stony Brook Gardens, another collaborator, Ms. Cohen said, and was unlike anything she had experienced in her field.
While Ms. Cohen worked with new acquaintances, other collaborations, such as the one between Princeton University geologist Lincoln Hollister and Mr. Goodheart, illustrate the work produced by a team whose friendship dates back 46 years.
Having met in a mineralogy class at Harvard as underclassmen, Prof. Hollister and Mr. Goodheart are putting an installation together that, if you don't listen closely, could sound like something it isn't: "Subduction and orogeny sounds sexual, doesn't it?" Mr. Goodheart said.
Their project examines the geologic event of mountain building, pushing tectonic plates together, using "metamorphic and metaphoric stones" representing the "universality and consistency of change."
"You'll see in the third dimension of what goes on," Prof. Hollister said, as Mr. Goodheart quickly added "It's about the whole world, about how things start, and all the forces of nature — it's beautiful."
Slabs of rock that represent different rock formations from around the globe will be on display, placed with "artistic liberty" while keeping a relative allegiance to the verity of the natural process, Prof. Hollister said.
Mr. Wilkes, who learned a tough fund-raising lesson with the Writers Block project in 2004, outlined several different scenarios when he, Mr. Goodheart, and Mr. Soderman, spoke at a presentation this past April at the Arts Council of Princeton's conTEMPORARY Arts Center at the Princeton Shopping Center. There were three models, ranging from the basic and inexpensive, to the ornate with penthouse prices. This Quark Park falls somewhere in between, but organizers are still $25,000 short of completion.
"We're getting close to the goal," Mr. Wilkes said, looking to avoid a curtain call of the $100,000 hit taken by organizers in 2004.
But for people like Prof. Hollister, who said, like many parties involved, that he was excited to be part of Quark Park, the potential impact outweighs a cost, per se: "I just hope it gets people interested."
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Contributions can be sent to Quark Park, c/o World Hope Foundation, PO Box 545, Princeton, NJ 08542. More information is available at www.QuarkPark.org.
