Rocking Cradle
| Hazlewood in Pittsburgh, PA | 2022 |
| Urban Furniture | Built |
The Rocking Cradle is an interactive installation featuring binder-jet-printed vessels integrated into a public tree nursery. Inspired by hydrological and geological processes, the installation merges urban furniture with functions like water collection, bird bathing, and growing native plants. Situated in a polluted, post-industrial area, it acts as ecological infrastructure that encourages environmental stewardship through urban play. Co-created via environmental justice workshops, the vessels’ semi-porous, stone-like surfaces feature messages from local youth, fostering community engagement. Each vessel, made from anthropogenic and earthen waste, serves as a symbolic substrate, creating a protective barrier for new plant life. Engaging the former steel mill site and its pollution patterns, the project draws attention to conflicted histories, encouraging empathy and awareness. Through water flow simulations, the vessels’ surfaces visually express landscape behaviors, while their geometric forms nurture ecological habitats and human interaction, cultivating new modes of play and ecological intimacy.
ROCKING CRADLE: Reconstituting Geology on a Damaged Earth, ACADIA 2022
ROCKING CRADLE: Interactive Urban Furniture In Pursuit Of Environmental Attunement, (Iaac) Public Play Space Symposium