Shaw Town

Shaw Town is the winning entry to the Ragdale Ring 2015 competition and the recipient of the Lucien LaGrange Prize. It resides on the grounds of the Ragdale Artist Colony in Lake Forest, IL as a venue for summer performances of all types: spoken word, dance, cabaret, etc. As part of the commission, winners Allison Newmeyer and Stewart Hicks lived at the colony for four weeks with nine of their friends, where they created the project in May and June of 2015. The name, Shaw Town, derives from the architect and initial owner of Ragdale, Howard Van Doren Shaw. Shaw was a prolific commercial and residential architect in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. The project revisits and recasts fragments of his buildings from around the city to be experienced anew: in foreign contexts, out of scale, and in unfamiliar materials. It consists of two parts: a wooden box and twenty foam cushions. The stage presents common design motifs from Shaw such as nestling silhouettes, tectonic decoration, and repetition in groupings of three are executed in dimensional lumber and plywood. Before or after a performance, it folds like a toy box for storage. In this configuration, the cushions peek out, revealing only pops of color that hint at the undiscovered fun. In preparation for a performance, the stage lowers and the cushions spill out like toys or animals let out of their pen. Design With Company worked with Arup engineers to optimize the stage for both acoustics, with Ryan Biziorek, and structural performance, with Brian McElhatten. The twenty cushions are stage’s softer counterpart. They directly take on the form and décor of specific buildings by Shaw. From the shape alone, it is unclear how to best utilize the quirky cushions during a performance. Instead, through exploration, people find their particular and unique body posture to engage the large moveable objects. Ride them, kick them, hug them, lay on them or lean against them, visitors are encouraged to rediscover Shaw’s buildings without even knowing it. The original Ragdale Ring, built in 1912, was a place for people to share collective experiences through play and performance. From its construction, the objects themselves, as well as the activities it supports, Shaw Town reinterprets that mission at every level. The new “ring” is also a performance, with moving parts, spectacles, and objects with character. It encourages audiences to perform as they interact with the building fragment cushions and discover new uses for them. Generous donations from Arup Americas, Sunbrella fabrics, Perennial fabrics, and the W.E. O’Neil Foundation made the project possible.