Paul Laffoley
Paul Laffoley (b. August 14, 1940) is an American artist and architect.
Biography
Laffoley was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to an Irish Catholic family. His father, Paul Laffoley, Sr., the president of the Cambridge Trust Company, was also a lawyer and taught classes at Harvard Business School. Early in life, Laffoley, Sr. also did on-stage performances as a medium.
By Laffoley's account, he spoke his first word ("Constantinople") at the age of six months, and then lapsed into 4 years of silence. He attended the progressive Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont, Massachusetts, where his draftsman's talent was ridiculed by his teachers. After attending Boston public schools for a short time, Laffoley matriculated at Brown University, graduating in 1962 with honors in Classics, Philosophy, and Art History. Laffoley has written that, in his senior year at Brown, he was given eight electric-shock treatments.
In 1963, he attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and apprenticed with the sculptor Mirko Basaldella before being dismissed from the institution. Thereafter, he moved to New York to apprentice with the visionary architect Friedrich Kiesler. He was also hired for the design team of the World Trade Center, but was soon after fired by the chief architect, Mihoru Yamasaki, for his unconventional ideas. In 1964, Laffoley moved into an eighteen- by thirty-foot utility room to found the Boston Visionary Cell (website: http://www.cybercom.net/~gsullivan/bvc/), where he has produced the large majority of his work.
During a CAT scan of his head in 1992, a piece of metal 3/8 of an inch long was discovered in the occipital lobe of his brain, near the pineal gland. Local Mutual UFO Network investigators declared it to be "an alien nanotechnological laboratory." Laffoley has come to believe that the "implant" is extraterrestrial in origin and is the main motivation behind his ideas and theories.
In the summer of 2001, Laffoley fell from a 20-foot ladder and broke both legs. His right leg subsequently became infected and was amputated below the knee. He documented some of his theories about why his fall occurred in the oil painting The Fetal Dream of Life into Death (2001-02).
After the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, Laffoley was one of a number of architects who, in 2002, submitted designs for the competition to plan the Freedom Tower. Laffoley took his inspiration from the work of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. His conception was to plan a gigantic hotel in the style of Gaudí's Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona.
Works
As of 2004, Laffoley claims to have executed over 800 works. His work over the last forty years is a dizzying mix of precise architectural-quality painting and ideas (both societally accepted and far on the fringe) from ancient times to the present. Laffoley has called his work a blend of the purely rational, Apollonian impulse and the purely emotional, Dionysian impulse.
He works in many types of media, including oil, acrylic, silkscreen, and pen-and-ink. His works are often square, and run the gamut in size.
Among his major works are:
Get Thee Behind Me, Satan (1974-1983)
A Human-Powered Vehicle (1976)
The Orgone Motor (1982)
Color Breathing (1983)
Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth (1990)
The Alchemy of Breathing (1992)
The Fetal Dream of Life into Death (2001-02)
After Gaudí: A Grand Hotel for New York City (2002)
Pickman's Mephitic Models (2004)
Sources
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/mephiticmodels.html
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/paulsleg.html
Bibliography
Laffoley, P. (1989). Paul Laffoley: The Phenomenology of Revelation. Boston: Kent Fine Art.
Laffoley, P. (1999). Architectonic Thought Forms: a Survey of the Art of Paul Laffoley 1967-1999. Austin, TX: Austin Museum of Fine Art.