Paul Laffoley

Paul Laffoley (August 14, 1935 – November 16, 2015) was an American visionary artist and architect from Boston, Massachusetts.

Paul Laffoley was born on August 14, 1935, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to an Irish Catholic family.

His father, Paul Laffoley, Sr., was president of the Cambridge Trust Company, and a lawyer who taught classes at Harvard Business School.

The elder Laffoley indoctrinated Paul, Jr. with his own religious philosophical beliefs, including aspects of Buddhism and Hinduism and what he called "mind-physics", but opposed Laffoley's pursuit of painting as a career.

Laffoley, Sr. also taught Paul that there was "no gravity".

Laffoley wrote that his first spoken word was "Constantinople" at the age of six months.

He did not speak again until he was four years old.

He was diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome, scoring both high and low academically.

According to Laffoley, he attended the progressive Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont, Massachusetts, where his talent as a draftsman was ridiculed by his abstract expressionist teachers.

After further studies at the Waldorf School, Laffoley would complete undergraduate studies at Brown University, graduating in 1961 with honors in classics, philosophy, and art history.

While at Brown in 1961, according to his "Phenomenology of Revelation", Laffoley was given eight Electroshock treatments after the termination of "about a year of weekly sessions with a psychiatrist, who had treated [him] for a mild state of catatonia"

In 1961, he enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he studied architecture because it consisted of diagrams that rendered objects in space with accuracy and precision.

He also studied sculpture at Harvard's Carpenter Center with Mirko Basaldella whom he cited as an early influence.

After one year, he was summarily expelled from GSD by the faculty for being "overly involved in his work".

By chance, Laffoley was given an issue of Progressive Architecture by his uncle with Frederick Kiesler on the cover.

After the death of his father in 1963, Laffoley returned to Boston and eventually established his first dedicated studio space, at 36 Bromfield Street, on Christmas Day, 1968.

It was there that Paul's career began to "connect" with an early show at the Orson Welles Theater, which was "hijacked" and taken to the Woodstock Music Festival for presentation by Dean Gitter, without Laffoley's permission.

In an effort to recover his work, Paul took the bus to Woodstock, which exposed him to the then-current countercultures of the day.

In a search for expanded opportunities, he went to New York in 1963 to work with the visionary artist and architect Frederick Kiesler, and was also recruited to view late-night TV for Andy Warhol in exchange for a place to sleep.

At that time, Laffoley had been painting in the basement of his family home in Belmont on the weekends, completing his first fully mature vision: The Kali-Yuga: The End of the Universe at 424826 A.D. From this point forward, Laffoley began to formulate his unique trans-disciplinary approach to a new discipline combining, philosophy, science, architecture and spirituality to the practice of painting.

Laffoley first began to organize his ideas in a format related to eastern mandalas, partially inspired by the late night patterns he watched for Warhol on late night television.

This quickly developed into four general subcategories of paintings: operating systems, psychotronic devices, meta-energy, time travel, and lucid dreaming.

Conceived of as "structured singularities", Laffoley never works in series, but rather approaches each project as a unique schematic.

This was followed by numerous exhibition opportunities and curatorial projects that lead to the creation of his Boston Visionary Cell (1971).

The Boston Visionary Cell, which Paul Laffoley founded on the model of an artists' guild, was a highly communal and curatorial undertaking.

The charter of the Boston Visionary Cell underscores Laffoley's thought processes "to develop and advance visionary art".

By the late 1980s, Laffoley began to evolve from the spiritual and the intellectual to the view of his work as an interactive, physically engaging psychotronic device, perhaps similar to architectural monuments such as Stonehenge or the Cathedral of Notre Dame and their spiritual aura.

Works such as Thanaton III (1989), The Orgone Motor (1983), and the Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from Earth (1990) followed this concept.

After the Austin Museum of Art organized a traveling survey of his career in 1999, Laffoley became something of a cult figure for curators around the world.

In 2001, Laffoley was badly injured in a fall.

Complications from diabetes led to his right leg being amputated below the knee; at Laffoley's request, Stan Winston made him a custom prosthetic which resembled a lion's paw (because Laffoley was a Leo).

Following his formal education in the classics at Brown and architectural studies at Harvard, Laffoley began to assimilate and systematically cross-pollinate his related strands of intellectual inquiry.

After the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in the September 11 attacks, 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 Família church in Barcelona.

The Palais de Tokyo in Paris devoted an entire room to his work in its 2009 exhibition "Chasing Napoleon", and several of his works were included in "The Alternative Guide to the Universe" at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2013.

Other major shows include Premonitions of the Bauharoque at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (publication), Secret Garden at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (publication), and the recent monograph entitled The Essential Paul Laffoley edited by Douglas Walla and published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2016.

Laffoley felt Kiesler's work was what he had been searching for and, after writing 17 letters, Laffoley went to New York and successfully entered an apprenticeship with Kiesler While canvasing the art scene in New York, Laffoley met Andy Warhol, who offered him a place to sleep at his 87th Street fire station if he would report on late night television between 1 and 5 am.

It was from watching these Indian Head Test Patterns, along with his early exposure to a Hindu tutor, that Laffoley would arrive at a format for his large scale paintings that would dominate his work for five decades.

On weekdays during this period, Laffoley found employment with Emery Roth & Sons where he worked on the plans for the yet to be built World Trade Center Towers before being terminated upon his suggestion of bridges joining the two buildings.