Downen’s “Architectural Folly from a Future Place” Featured in Kansas City Magazine
12.02.2025
The work in Swope Park recently drew attention in the press, shining a spotlight on the piece by Associate Professor and Chair of Sculpture Jill Downen.
Kansas City Magazine opened its profile of “Architectural Folly from a Future Place” with this introduction:
A low concrete wall split down the middle. It’s not quite a bench, and not quite a barrier—which is exactly the point.
For seven years now, sculptor Jill Downen’s Architectural Folly from a Future Place has lived in Swope Park, just steps from General Swope’s Greek-Doric mausoleum. Originally commissioned for Kansas City’s citywide arts initiative Open Spaces in 2018, Architectural Folly doesn’t shout for attention but quietly invites passersby to reconsider a simple question: What are walls for?
“The idea came from a desire to see a wall as a bench,” Downen says. “Walls divide space and mark territory, but they can also serve as benches.” It’s a simple observation about how we can use the structures around us, in both the physical and metaphorical sense. The title, Architectural Folly from a Future Place, also hints at something bigger: “It’s one project in a long series that links past ideas with present ones and points toward future artworks from my imagination.”