Philly Fringe 2025: Greg Kennedy presents Architectonica

This is a collaborative workshop, where audience members assemble large, delicately balanced structures under Kennedy’s guidance. The idea is to give the audience an inside look at the delicate art of architectural engineering from the viewpoint of the engineer. His premise is that everything we make is a form of juggling, and that we’re all jugglers whether or not we realize it.

Learning to build and let go

With an audience of about 20, Kennedy starts with small models, demonstrating the principles of tension and balance in da Vinci’s bridge drawings and Alexander Calder’s mobiles. Once he’s demonstrated the principles on these models, he invites viewers to participate in assembling much larger models. Some of these are more than six feet high. Some of them are bridges or seats that participants are then invited to climb on.

The show takes place in Kennedy’s studio on Mt. Airy’s Circus Campus, a former classroom on the lower mezzanine. The audience on the date I attended varied in age, but as the projects progressed, the four under 20 became featured players. Kennedy brings up four to 15 audience members for each project, starting them on small models, or with one stick each, and then building up larger and more delicately balanced pieces. In a way, he’s training them to assemble the final piece…which I won’t describe, except to say it would have been a bad idea for audience members to attempt it in the first half of the show. But as the hour closed out, everyone stood in a circle as Kennedy said “Very slowly, let go.” And emotionally and physically, everyone did.

Assisting at times was Brynna Raine, moving assembled pieces offstage to make room for the next assignment in a way that sometimes added some deft, light physical comedy, plus jokey interaction with the audience that nicely melded with Kennedy’s warm style.

Tensegrity and team-building

There are moments near the beginning where it can really come off like a class. As the pieces grow in complexity, Kennedy refers to the work of contemporary artists Kenneth Snelson and Rinus Roelof, lesser-known outside of the art world but following the same influences as Kennedy. There is talk of isosceles triangles, Buckminster Fuller, and tensegrity, Snelson’s concept of solid objects, such as poles, held in place by tension with cables or chains. Kennedy’s performances usually let the work speak for itself, but the lesson aspect here can, at points, distract the audience from considering the art of the craft—especially when they’re onstage and concentrating on not moving a plank and crashing the whole sculpture to the ground. It’s an amazing, entertaining show, but don’t come expecting an art epiphany (though I overheard one woman whisper that she’d been inspired for a new feature in her garden).

Architectonica captures the sense of what it’s like to be a working artist in the studio. At least one of the teens in attendance seemed inspired by the work—given the nature of the show, work has a double meaning—and among the rest of the audience there was a noticeable shift from trusting confusion to real collaboration as the concepts and hands-on experience pulled them together as a team.