Here is another post inspired by last week's Playful Event. I was tempted to call this post 'Rekindling of Faith' which is the feeling I had after hearing Eric Clough talking about his architectural-puzzle-wonder on Fifth Avenue in NY. Eric was commissioned to apply his architectural and design talents to create a 'non-cookie-cutter style apartment' for the Klinsky-Sherry family. What followed was this:
1. The architectural designer Eric Clough embedded 18
clues in the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Klinsky-Sherry family, leading them on a scavenger hunt
through the rooms of their home.
But not all at once. One of the things I love about this is the patience, the ability to hold back, wait:
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. The
book led them on a scavenger hunt through their own apartment.
3. A rectangular panel in the den and guest room opens to reveal acrylic
slices, far left, that fit together to form a cube. When the chamfered
magnetic cube lodged above the slices is dragged over the 24 panels on
a nearby wall, they open.
4. Behind the panels, large white letters laser-cut into teal blue acrylic
spell out the words of a poem written years ago by Steven B. Klinsky,
the apartment's owner, for his wife, Maureen
Sherry, and their children.
5. Decorative leather molding stamped with letters in a hallway can be
popped out and wrapped around a rod removed from the foot of Ms. Sherry
and Mr. Klinsky’s
bed so that the letters on the coiled leather spell out a clue.
Here's something else that I love about this story; here's a little piece from the full NYT article:
'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.'
And she did.
6. Behind a drawing of a plane that hangs in a hallway is a little niche containing a scale model of the
kitchen, a clue that leads to a musical score written for the apartment, which is hidden in a drawer above the stove.
7. Millwork panels in a hallway were designed
to look like Le Corbusier’s Modular Man and da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Puzzle pieces hidden in one
fit together to make a key that opens the other.
8. In assembling talents for his project, Mr. Clough aimed high. His first
choice for the author of the book that contains clues to the scavenger
hunt in addition to the mystery story, was Jonathan Safran Foer, whose
work contains its own sort of coded narrative pyrotechnics. Mr. Clough
sent him a puzzle cube similar to this one, stamped with his firm’s
phone number and the word “Please.”
9. Photographs of the apartment’s original interiors have secret writing on the back that reveals the number of
salamanders in the apartment. The salamander is a motif that is part of the puzzle and appears throughout the apartment.
10. Door knockers on opposite walls of a hallway initially seemed pointless. They can be removed
and joined to create a crank that opens hidden
panels in the dining room sideboard.
11. The custom-made sideboard has hidden panels on either side that can be cranked open to display keys and keyholes.
12. When the correct keys are used, hidden drawers are revealed.
13. The drawers contained acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted
with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle. The answers to the crossword
puzzle led to
the panels in the guest room, behind which were the words of the poem.
14. The children’s bedrooms have radiator covers with poems written specifically for each child cut into
them in code. The Caesar Shift cipher in the
bedroom of the oldest child, Cavan, was broken
by a friend.
All pictures taken from the NYT slideshow 'Cracking the Code'. Full 'Mystery on Fifth Avenue' article and narrative here.
Bloody wonderful.
