© Austin + Mergold with Marc Krawitz. Special thanks to Cornell University Department of Architecture, Drexel University Department of Architecture and Interiors, Saint-Gobain, Simpson Strong-Tie & Boris Ravvin, Billy Haines, Yuri Mergold, Daniel Marino,Spencer Lapp and Andrew Fu

Noah’s Ark, after it landed on Mount Ararat, became perhaps the first architectural folly – an imposing fanciful, yet purposeless structure: a boat with no water around, a house with no inhabitants, a simple hulking mass of a conflicted typology.
SuralArk (SA) is an American vernacular interpretation of the original. Made of 2x6 lumber and vinyl siding, the SA has its material origins in the American suburbia that is surprisingly close to NYC (incidentally, there is a vinyl sided house just across the street from Socrates Park entrance) and its formal roots as a (discarded) upturned ship cast ashore. Whether this was once a house in Levittown now on its way to becoming a boat, or a new hybrid house-boat under construction on the shore of East River in anticipation of the next hurricane flood is not entirely clear. And visitor is invited inside, under the siding canopy, to rest upon a foam bench (EPS foam is used in both house and ship construction, and one of the leading contributors to landfill waste) and contemplate the present horizon of Socrates park and NYC, the past, as well as forthcoming great floods.