The Triple Folly

The Triple Folly recounts the rich collaboration between artist Thomas Demand, architects Caruso St John, and textile makers Kvadrat which produced an astonishing new pavilion for Kvadrat’s Ebeltoft campus. The basis of the building is three found paper objects – a legal pad, a paper plate, and a soda jerk hat – which Demand brought to Caruso St John with the simple question ‘Can you make this into architecture?’ In response, the architects created a sculptural tripartite folly, a kind of inhabitable still life poised on the area’s rolling seaside hillocks, encompassing a meeting room, a kitchen, and a flexible living space which holds an artwork by the artist Rosemarie Trockel. Inspired by Kvadrat’s role as a celebrated textile producer, Demand initially pursued the idea of the tent as an archetypal structure across contexts of leisure and shelter, simplicity and grandeur. Translating these concepts into his own artistic idiom of paper, he tasked Caruso St John with materialising this