MZA along with Brian Phelps (Hawkins Partners, Inc.) and Betsy Mason (Nashville Civic Design Center) designed the "Ocean of Notions" tree house for Cheekwoods annual Treehouses Exhibition. This year’s theme is great works of literature. The inspiration for Ocean of Notions comes from Salman Rushdie's only published children’s book "Haroun and the Sea of Stories". One of the characters in the novel, Rashid Khalifa, is a story teller known as the Ocean of Notions, the Shah of Blah. Rashid and his son, Haroun, are transported to a magical land where stories are born and flow together into a Sea of Stories with a "thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour." The treehouse is an interpretation of the Sea of Stories where colored ropes representing the Story Streams are tangled into a ball and require tending by Mali, the Floating Gardener. Children can climb into the ball and pretend to be Mali; "untwisting twisted Story Streams… Gardening."
The Treehouse Exhibit runs through September 3.