PLOT is a Brook­lyn based design/build firm spe­cial­iz­ing in archi­tec­ture, event design, graphic design and cus­tom fabrication.

Why were you inter­ested in par­tic­i­pat­ing in The Putting Lot? Does it relate to work you’ve done in the past?

The Putting Lot design chal­lenge appealed to our overde­vel­oped inter­est in not grow­ing up.

What is the inspi­ra­tion for your design? How does it relate to urban sustainability?

Our hole is meant to be an anal­o­gous rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the frus­trat­ing rela­tion­ship between emerg­ing envi­ron­men­tal build­ing tech­nolo­gies and stan­dard indus­trial prac­tices. In order to deploy sus­tain­able prod­ucts and tech­niques, care­ful plan­ning is required to over­come the indus­try iner­tia asso­ci­ated with mod­ern construction.

What else would you like to see in an empty space in the city?

Stat­ues of giant ants, water­slides, and a Bil­lie Ocean museum. Addi­tion­ally, it might be nice to have some of the less socially and envi­ron­men­tally sen­si­tive con­do­mini­ums that recently took over much of NYC con­verted back to empty lots.

Do you have any child­hood mem­o­ries or good sto­ries about minia­ture golf?

Actu­ally yes, one of our team mem­bers was found in a bas­ket on the doorstep of a mini-golf course as a baby. That team mem­ber was sub­se­quently taken in by the own­ers who raised the baby as their own. Among the many mini-golf secrets they taught the child was the leg­endary “triple reverse down­spout”. A move so com­plex and dan­ger­ous that it’s prac­tice was thought by most to have been long for­got­ten. Years went by and the child grew to an adult. These were the hal­cyon days. Then one after­noon, while walk­ing home from the mar­ket, our team­mate saw smoke in the dis­tance. Fear­ing for the family’s safety, our team­mate ran home as fast as pos­si­ble only to find the par­ents dead the mini-golf destroyed. All evi­dence sug­gested that they had been killed by a ter­ri­ble rival clan of mini-golfers from the neigh­bor­ing dis­trict. Vow­ing revenge, our team­mate has devoted count­less years to the pur­suit of jus­tice. It was through this search that our team­mate even­tu­ally came to us, bring­ing a life­time of mini-golf skill and the secrets taught by the elders.

What do you hope to see at The Putting Lot this summer?

Any col­lab­o­ra­tive artis­tic endeavor brings peo­ple together in unex­pected ways. Design com­pe­ti­tions are espe­cially inter­est­ing because the diver­sity of ideas devel­oped from a sin­gu­lar con­cept can be dra­matic and what we have seen on site thus far has rein­forced that. We look for­ward to spend­ing addi­tional time with this com­mu­nity of design­ers who’s inter­ests seem par­al­lel to our own.