[UA] An Apartment of Puzzles and Riddles

[Anthony H.]

42?

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 9:08 AM, Bret Allen <arcturus91 at hotmail.com> wrote:

>  Now that is awesome. I would kill for that apartment (or more so for that
> kind of money)
>
>
>
> In ua terms I would be worried that solving these riddles and puzzles is
> gradually programming the minds of the family through symbolic manipulation
> and thought processes.
>
>
>
> Maybe a huge mechanomantic device which requires the family to be it's
> 'software', running through the machine like rats through a maze,
> programming the family and being the ultimate moving parts for the machine.
>
>
>
> When they are done, perhaps they will help to solve some arcane equation
> about human existence?
>
>
>
> *Bret Allen*
>
> *==========*
>
> *Editor - Sleepwalkers Magazine*
>
> www.sleepwalkersmagazine.com
>
> www.sleepwalkersphotography.com
>
> tel -01782822750
>
> mob - 07795320920
>
> hq - 2 Queens Row
>
> Bournes Bank
>
> Burslem
>
> Stoke-on-Trent
>
> ST6 3FA
>
>
>
> *From:* ua-bounces at lists.unknown-armies.com [mailto:
> ua-bounces at lists.unknown-armies.com] *On Behalf Of *Anthony H.
> *Sent:* 13 June 2008 15:00
> *To:* Unknown Armies
> *Subject:* [UA] An Apartment of Puzzles and Riddles
>
>
>
> There's an apartment in New York on Fifth Avenue that an architect has made
> into a puzzle laden with intricate riddles for the children of the tenants.
> What will happen once it is solved? Is there more to this than child's play?
>
>
> Here's the story.
>
> ___________________________________________
>
> *Mystery on Fifth Avenue*
>
>
>
> By PENELOPE GREEN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/penelope_green/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
>
> Published: June 12, 2008
>
>
>
> THINGS are not as they seem in the 14th-floor apartment on upper Fifth
> Avenue. At first blush the family that occupies it looks to be very much of
> a type. The father, Steven B. Klinsky, 52, runs a private equity company;
> the mother, Maureen Sherry, 44, left her job as a managing director for Bear
> Stearns to raise their four young children (two boys and two girls); and the
> dog, LuLu, is a soulful Lab mix rescued from a pound in Louisiana.
>
>
>
> They are living in a typical habitat for the sort of New Yorkers they
> appear to be: an enormous '20s-era co-op with Central Park views (once part
> of a triplex built for the philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post),
> gutted to its steel beams and refitted with luxurious flourishes like
> 16th-century Belgian mantelpieces and custom furniture made from exotic
> woods with unpronounceable names.
>
> But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets —
> messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems
> and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric
> Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from
> Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.
>
> The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional
> narrative that recalls "The Da Vinci Code" (without the funky religion or
> buckets of blood) and "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E.
> Frankweiler," the children's classic by E. L. Konigsburg about a brother and
> a sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/metropolitan_museum_of_art/index.html?inline=nyt-org>and discover — and solve — a mystery surrounding a Renaissance sculpture. It
> has its own soundtrack, too, with contributions by Kate Fenner, a young
> Canadian singer and songwriter with a lusty, alternative, Joni Mitchell<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/joni_mitchell/index.html?inline=nyt-per>-ish
> sound, with whom Mr. Clough fell in love during the project.
>
> It all began simply enough, Ms. Sherry said, when she and her husband
> bought the 4,200-square-foot apartment for $8.5 million in 2003.
>
> "I just didn't want it to be this cookie-cutter, Upper East Side, Fifth
> Avenue kind of place," she said.
>
> The six-foot-tall Ms. Sherry doesn't fit the mold of Fifth Avenue either:
> she is a former triathlete and nonfiction writer who is more interested in
> her children's sneakers than in the offerings of the shoe department at
> Barneys.
>
> Architects she met with made very cookie-cutterish proposals, until she met
> Mr. Clough, now 35, who was a friend of a friend, and they got to talking.
> He had smart ideas, like moving the front door and eliminating the very
> grand and formal front hall, the kind with marble floors and too many doors
> "that you'd put a round table in the middle of and flowers on top of that,"
> Ms. Sherry said. "A total waste of space."
>
> What Ms. Sherry didn't realize until much later was that Mr. Clough had a
> number of other ideas about her apartment that he didn't share with her. It
> began when Mr. Klinsky threw in his two cents, a vague request that a poem
> he had written for and about his family be lodged in a wall somewhere, Ms.
> Sherry said, "put in a bottle and hidden away as if it were a time capsule."
> (Ms. Sherry said that her husband is both dogged and romantic, a guy
> singularly focused on the welfare of children, not just his own. Mr. Klinsky
> runs Victory Schools, a charter school company that seeds schools in
> neighborhoods around the country, as well as an after-school program in East
> New York that his own children help out with regularly.)
>
> That got Mr. Clough, who is the sort of person who has a brainstorm on a
> daily basis, thinking about children and inspiration and how the latter
> strikes the former. "I'd just read something about Einstein being inspired
> by a compass he'd been given as a child," he said. The Einstein story set
> Mr. Clough off, and he began to ponder ways to spark a child's mind. "I was
> thinking that maybe there could be a game or a scavenger hunt embedded in
> the apartment — that was the beginning," he said.
>
> Before long, his firm, 212box, was knee-deep in code and cipher books,
> furnituremakers were devising secret compartments, and Mr. Clough's former
> colleague, Heather Bensko, an architectural and graphic designer who had
> been his best friend at the Yale School of Architecture, found herself
> researching the lives of 40 historical figures, starting with Francis I of
> France and ending with Mrs. Post.
>
> Ms. Bensko said she began writing chapters for a book, imagining scenes
> from the childhoods of those inspirational figures and trying to connect
> them. When that didn't pan out as a narrative technique, she invented two
> best friends living in New York City who discover a mystery in an apartment
> and, in the course of unraveling the mystery, a sort of treasure hunt, they
> "meet" the historical figures.
>
> All of that was tied into gizmos Mr. Clough, Ms. Bensko and others in their
> office hid in the apartment — without telling the clients — in a way that is
> almost too complicated to explain.
>
> The renovation took a year and a half, and Mr. Clough, who acted as
> construction manager, brought it in for $300 a square foot, a rather
> conservative figure given the neighborhood and the scope of the project.
> Designing and producing the apartment's hidden features, however, including
> its book and music, took four years, said Mr. Clough, who absorbed much of
> the cost in terms of his own billable hours, and relied on the generosity of
> more than 40 friends and artisans who became captivated by the project. He
> said he "begged, borrowed and stole" from them "in the collaborative
> process."
>
> "People were definitely not paid," he said, "and we extend our thanks. It
> absorbed the minds of many people."
>
> In assembling talents for his project, Mr. Clough aimed high. His first
> choice for the author of the book, which contains clues to the scavenger
> hunt in addition to the mystery story, was Jonathan Safran Foer<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/jonathan_safran_foer/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> whose work contains its own sort of coded narrative pyrotechnics. Mr. Clough
> sent him a little tease, a Rubik's Cube of a sculpture made of anodized
> aluminum, encased in an acrylic cube that opens into a puzzle stamped with
> his firm's phone number and the word "Please."
>
> Mr. Foer was intrigued and gave him a call. In an e-mail recently, Mr. Foer
> recalled that his daughter had just been born, and he was adrift in a fog of
> new parenthood. "It was a very good piece of mail that came at a very bad
> time," he wrote. "I was losing and ignoring all kinds of things that I
> shouldn't have. Did we speak on the phone? The whole thing was so dreamy I
> can't really remember. In fact, the project was never described to me as
> simply as you did in your e-mail. Had it been, I would have rushed to do it.
> I suppose that's the price one pays for being as mysterious as Clough is. Or
> as skeptical as I am."
>
> The sculptor Tom Otterness was another hoped-for collaborator, but Mr.
> Clough said Mr. Otterness's acquiescence was conditional on Mr. Foer's, and
> anyway he would have needed to be paid. "Of course I couldn't have done it
> for free," Mr. Otterness said this week.
>
> The apartment is quite attractive and perfectly functional in all the
> typical ways, and its added features remained largely unnoticed by its
> inhabitants for quite some time after they moved in, in May of 2006. Then
> one night four months later, Cavan Klinsky, who is now 11, had a friend
> over. The boy was lying on the floor in Cavan's bedroom, staring at dozens
> of letters that had been cut into the radiator grille. They seemed random —
> FDYDQ, for example. But all of a sudden the friend leapt up with a shriek,
> Ms. Sherry said, having realized that they were actually a cipher (a Caesar
> Shift cipher, to be precise), and that Cavan's name was the first word.
>
> Another evening, Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky were lying in their custom-made
> bed when a rod running along its foot snapped off. "I'm thinking, What the
> heck kind of cheap bed is this?" said Ms. Sherry, who phoned Mr. Clough the
> next day.
>
> His response, which might have taken a less adventurous person aback, was
> that she take a wait-and-see attitude, that the bed bit was part of a larger
> "story" and that all would be revealed in good time. Oh, and he told her to
> just snap the piece back into the bed. (Ms. Sherry learned later that the
> piece of wood is meant to be wrapped with a leather strap — part of a
> decorative molding in another part of the house — which in its coiled shape
> reveals a message.) That Ms. Sherry gamely complied is another example of
> how flexible she is as a client. "Most people" — like her friends and her
> mother, she said — "couldn't believe how hands-off I was about the whole
> project. But I do think you have to trust people. You can't stand behind
> them breathing down their neck, particularly if they're creative."
>
> Finally, one day last fall, more than a year after they moved in, Mr.
> Klinsky received a letter in the mail containing a poem that began:
>
> *We've taken liberties with Yeats*
>
> *to lead you through a tale*
>
> *that tells of most inspired fates*
>
> *in hopes to lift the veil.*
>
> The letter directed the family to a hidden panel in the front hall that
> contained a beautifully bound and printed book, Ms. Bensko's opus. The book
> led them on a scavenger hunt through their own apartment.
>
> But not all at once. The 18 clues were sophisticated and in many cases
> confounding. The family, Ms. Sherry said, worked in fits and starts over a
> two-week period, calling Mr. Clough for help when they got bogged down,
> which happened with increasing frequency as they approached the last of the
> clues. Indeed, as Ms. Sherry and Mr. Clough told their tale, this reporter
> had to ask Ms. Sherry if she ever questioned her architect's sanity. "Yes,"
> she replied cheerfully.
>
> In any case, the finale involved, in part, removing decorative door
> knockers from two hallway panels, which fit together to make a crank, which
> in turn opened hidden panels in a credenza in the dining room, which
> displayed multiple keys and keyholes, which, when the correct ones were
> used, yielded drawers containing acrylic letters and a table-size cloth
> imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle, the answers to which
> led to one of the rectangular panels lining the tiny den, which concealed a
> chamfered magnetic cube, which could be used to open the 24 remaining
> panels, revealing, in large type, the poem written by Mr. Klinsky. (There is
> other stuff in there, too, but a more detailed explanation might drive a
> reader crazy.)
>
> The Sherry-Klinsky clan remains largely bemused by the extent to which Mr.
> Clough embellished and embedded their apartment. But Ms. Sherry and Mr.
> Klinsky are not immune to the romance of objects or messages hidden in
> walls, or what Ms. Sherry called "winks from one family to another."
>
> "You move into a place and you have your life there, and your memories, and
> it's all temporary," she said. "Especially with apartments, which have such
> a fixed footprint. I like the idea of putting something behind a wall to
> wink at the next inhabitant and to wish them the good life hopefully that
> you have had there." Two years ago, when Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky left the
> El Dorado on Central Park West to move into their new apartment, Ms. Sherry
> tried to create such a wink. She loaded an MP3 player with music they had
> loved and listened to during their time there — James Taylor<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/james_taylor/index.html?inline=nyt-per>singing "Jellyman Kelly," songs by
> U2<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/u2/index.html?inline=nyt-org>and Jakob Dylan — and tucked it behind a panel filled with electrical
> equipment.
>
> Six months ago, "someone drops off the MP3 player with our doorman here,"
> she said, "along with a note that read something to the effect of — You
> cannot believe where we found this thing. Good luck in your new home."
>
> ___________________________________________
>
> The link to the story is HERE<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/garden/12puzzle.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all>
> .
>
>
>
> For a picture slideshow of the house, click HERE<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/11/garden/0612-PUZZLE_index.html>
> .
>
> --
> "Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt
> the real and the unreal..."
>
> - H.P. Lovecraft
>
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>


-- 
"Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt
the real and the unreal..."

- H.P. Lovecraft
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