I’m Alex Ward. I build structures that fail every engineering test and pass every compositional one. Projecting Over Nothing is a cantilever in four colours, holding air it has no business holding.
The thing I keep coming back to is what happens when you apply architectural rigour to impossible forms. This one pushes that question about as far as it goes.
The overhang is the entire point
Cantilevers work by counterweight. You extend mass past a support point, and something heavier on the other side keeps it level. That’s the engineering.
Here, the yellow and red blocks project left with nothing underneath them. The blue and green sit on the right, but they’re not heavy enough to matter—they’re the same thickness, the same material, weightless. It shouldn’t hold. It does anyway, because it’s flat.
The structure survives by being two-dimensional. The moment you try to build it, it collapses. I like that.
Four colours, exact placement
Yellow over red, blue over green. Each block is sized to a grid, each edge lands on a line. I work out the proportions before I start, then cut the tape and paint to those marks.
Ruby called the balance perfect, and she’s right, but the balance isn’t intuitive. It’s calculated. The yellow has to be exactly that wide or the whole thing tips visually left. The red has to stop where it stops or the overhang reads as floating, not cantilevered.
There’s a single white gap where the blocks don’t meet. That’s load-bearing too—it keeps the colours separate so you can see the structure as layers, not a single shape.
Charlotte said it was bold
She’s not wrong, but I’d say it differently. It’s bold because it commits. The cantilever either works or it doesn’t—there’s no hedging with texture or gradient to distract you if the proportions are off.
Hard-edge geometry has no forgiveness. A line is sharp or it isn’t. A colour sits next to another colour and either the relationship holds or you see the mistake from across the room. This one holds.
Valentina called it exceptional, which I’ll take. It’s one of the clearest examples of what I’m doing: architecture that only exists as colour and proportion, rigorous but impossible.
For
This is for people who like geometry that doesn’t apologize for being geometry. If you want something expressive or loose, this will read as cold. If you want to see a structure argue with physics and win on composition alone, it’s here.
Gallery-wrapped canvas, in 3 sizes — 14×11, 20×16, 24×18 in. Ships free within the continental US.
