the luminary

I received some fantastic news last week!

The design I submitted to The Genesis Prize Foundation's award design competition was chosen as a finalist. My design was chosen by a highly esteemed panel of judges to continue on to the selection committee who will meet this summer in London to pick the winner. I feel pretty honoured to have made it this far and have my work seen by architecture giants like Phyllis Lambert, Daniel Libeskind and Ron Arad, to name a few. The selection committee is made up of Lord John Browne (Chairman of the Tate galleries in the UK), Peter Aven (Co-Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Russia), Dasha Zhukova (founder of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow) and Glenn D. Lowry (Director of The Museum of Modern Art in NYC). 

To learn more about the design competition and the foundation click here.

CONCEPT

The design for this award was inspired by Johannes Kepler’s Platonic solid model of the solar system from his work Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596) and the Kabbalistic teachings of the mathematics and underlying geometry of the universe. Coupled with the spiritual concepts behind the Adamic Judaism metaphor that the structure of existence is three interconnected cubes telescoping out from one source cube; thereby symbolizing our divine connection to source and to each other, and therefore implying we are ultimately all one, the idea of ‘oneness’ directly corresponds with the mission of the Genesis Prize to inspire unity throughout the Jewish community. By using the basic cube I wanted to explore its solid and void space by altering the scale and intersecting the volumes, while still communicating the intertwined nature of consciousness. The award’s architectural form is decidedly minimal and uses clear geometry to symbolize the spiritual language of our reality, and that all of humanity is connected in divine light. The design of this award is conceptually sophisticated while still being sculptural, precise in proportion and acknowledges the purity of geometry.