The Core Sample
Texas Tech needed one piece to do two jobs, sculpture and landscape, in a courtyard built to survive Lubbock's dust and sun. I proposed a form that reads like a core sample pulled from the ground: a stacked-glass core that looks wet without a drop of water, sheathed in polished stone. Built for scientists, and built to outlast them.
Half the funding sat in a landscape budget, so the art and the planting had to be a single gesture. Water features were discouraged in the dry climate, and the audience was mostly scientists. I treated all of it as the brief, not the obstacle.
- ClientTexas Tech University System
- Budget$235,000, all-inclusive
- StandingOne of four finalists, 2013
The site, the courtyard plan, and the deliberately asymmetric footprint.
It started in clay. I worked the asymmetry by hand until the footprint felt subtly wrong on purpose, then resolved the form for cast and carved stone, with the elliptical core closing near the top.
The finished maquette. The core is stacked, cut glass, its leading edges catching light so the surface reads like moving water. The shell is polished natural stone, seamed so finely it looks like one solid block of sedimentary rock. Every fabrication and installation plan was drawn to conservator standards, to hold up against sun, heat, and decades of daily hands.
Up the back, a cutaway holds a living wall of desert succulents that shifts with the seasons, so the piece keeps changing long after it is installed. No cactus, no Southwest cliché, closer to an extraterrestrial garden that only grows more at home on its site with time.
"It's like a core sample naturally jutting out of the ground."Dakota Warren — from the finalist presentation
