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Trippy Experimental Architecture Gives New Meaning to “Brownstone”

by Chris Beam | November 30, 2006 at 12:39 pm

Trippy Experimental Architecture Gives New Meaning to "Brownstone"

A Brown correspondent writes in with news from the spaciest Ivy:

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; give a stoner a “sticktastic,” Hobbit-like, organically ambient tree sculpture and he trips out for weeks. Following the completion of artist Patrick Dougherty’s sapling sculpture on Brown University’s Front Campus, people young and old have stopped to take in the impressive creation that seems to grow out of the ground itself. For some subclasses of the Brown cultural lexicon, this pull is particularly enveloping.

“They’re like bubbles of wood … It is a special place. It seems to have its own gravity and logic. Smoking there is like communing with plants in nature’s womb,” said a Brown first-year who wished to be known as “Scuba Steve.” His friend quickly added, “It’s a portal to an alien world.”

Not to misrepresent the Brown community or its fragrant denizens. This was hardly a “sculpture goes up, stoners move in” sort of situation. Most, if not a high majority of the people enjoying the sculpture, are not doing it under the influence of marijuana, opium, or any of the other assorted psychedelics that even seeing this artwork subconsciously demands.

Nevertheless, the sculpture has been a popular destination for students. The very look and feel of the sculpture fits the eco-friendly aesthetic of any college’s pot-smoking population. Thousands of locally harvested saplings (i.e “sticks”) beget a roughly textured woodland creation. Its not that everyone’s on drugs — its just better when you’re high. Wait … did I say that? Or only think it?

UPDATE 2:51 p.m.: Cornell stoners nod knowingly.

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