BROOKLYN, New York (2/15/12) – Beam Camp, the New Hampshire summer camp for the fine and manual arts, technology and collaboration, announced today the winners of its 2012 Beam Project search. Each summer Beam Camp commissions large-scale collaborative projects to be realized by Beam campers, aged 7-17, and staff at the camp’s 106-acre facility in Strafford, New Hampshire.
Proposals from Matthew Springett Associates of London and Rachel Kunreuther and Douglas Stookey of Washington, D.C. have been chosen as this summer’s Beam Projects.
Selected from among forty submissions from architects, designers, engineers, artists and big thinkers from sixteen countries, this year’s winning proposals are each ambitious, multi-layered building undertakings that reflect Beam’s core emphasis on cultivating creative thinking and applied collaborative effort.
In “Creature Quake,” Beam Project 2012.1 (Session 1 June 28-July 22), Rachel Kunreuther and Douglas Stookey’s proposal will reshape the camp’s landscape to reveal enormous creatures in earth, sky and lake. Beam campers and staff will construct an array of large-scale forms and structures imbued with their own kind of life and movement. Says Kunreuther of the project, “We want to build creatures that evoke the very real apprehension and fascination many of us have felt, in all stages of our lives, for the unknown world around us. By creating something real out of what is daunting and mysterious, we invite campers to forge positive personal relationships with their natural surroundings, to be inspired instead of afraid.”
In “Navigating Dreams,” Beam Project 2012.2 (Session 2 July 22-August 19), Matthew Springett Associates, Beam campers and staff will construct a new night sky of LED constellations controlled and navigated by a boat-machine. Says Springett, “I have long been inspired and haunted by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story ‘Light is Like Water’ and the idea of imagined, dream-like, navigation into the world beyond; of using one element (light) in place of another (water) to create an opportunity for escape. The lost art of navigating by the stars will be explored as we develop our own stellar landscape with which the navigator can chart their journey and interact. We will navigate our dreams in a world of light.”
Previous winners have included Caitlin Berrigan’s “Macro/Micro Domes,” Steve Gerberich & Nathaniel Lieb’s “Beam Fleet,” Jan Drojarski and Jon Bocksel’s “Jungletopia,” Christine Baumgartner and Manuel Kretzer’s “Float With The Flowers,” the solar-powered film “A Trip to the Sun” by Daniela Kostova and Mike DeSeve, WIgnall & Moore’s “The Stories of Machines That Never Flew” and “The Habitats of Parker Mountain” by pragmatopia and architecture students of the University of Kassel.
ABOUT BEAM CAMP Beam Camp offers two 4 week summer sessions for kids aged 7-17 in Strafford, New Hampshire. Beam Campers cultivate hands-on skills while exploring innovative thinking, design and the creative process. They swim, hike, play games and enjoy 750 acres of mountain, forests and lakes, while transforming ideas into artifacts and personal achievement into community success.