The Ragdale Foundation, a nonprofit artist’s community in Lake Forest, Illinois, has selected a design duo from Columbus, Ohio to design this year’s Ragdale Ring. The temporary installation interprets the original Ragdale Ring, a theater in a garden designed by architect Howard Van Doren Shaw more than a century ago.
Galo Canizares and Stephanie Sang Delgado, a project associate at DesignGroup, are calling their proposal Noodle Soup. In plan, five yellow-orange squiggles are loosely dispersed between blue and green objects that seem to weave the site’s grassy lawn into lounge-y areas for seated relaxation. Here’s what Canizares, a lecturer at the Ohio State University and founding principal of office ca, had to say about the design:
“[Noodle Soup] is conceived as an interactive playscape for outdoor performances. It consists of a set of fixed structures around which are soft, linear, pliable pieces of furniture. The soft elements can interact with the hard structures to serve functional purposes such as seating, but they can also act as oversized toys, freely configurable in a variety of ways.”
To build their design for its June 13 opening, Canizares and Delgado will have a design-build residency at Ragdale along with a $15,000 production grant.
For the 2018 competition, an eight-member jury selected the duo’s proposal from a pool of five finalists. The four runners-up were Wheeler Kearns’s Iris, Katie MacDonald, Kyle Schumann, and Erin Pellegrino’s Earthen Delight, Cyrus Penarroyo’s Reflections on the Lawn, and Aleksandr Plotkin’s Phantom.
Last year, Ann Arbor, Michigan–based T+E+A+M won the Ragdale Ring competition, and this year, four of the practice’s members sat on the jury. They were joined by two representatives from the Ragdale Foundation, as well as Zurich Esposito of AIA Chicago and Phil Rosborough of Rosborough Partners. Prior winners include Bittertang, SPORTS, Design With Company, and Stephen Dietrich Lee.
More information about the competition, opening day, and past winners can be found here.
