2012 Merit Award, AIA NY Chapter, Un-built Category - with Kate Bernheimer, LevenBetts, Guy Nordenson and Associates  Fairy tales have transfixed readers for thousands of years, and for many reasons; one of the most compelling is the promise of a magical home. How many architects, young and old, have been inspired by the hero or heroine, banished from the cottage, lost in the woods, who risks everything to find a forever-space? In this series of three we looked at fairy tales through the lens of architecture. Participating firms — Bernheimer Architecture, Leven Betts, and Guy Nordenson and Associates — selected favorite tales and produced works exploring the intimate relationship between the domestic structures of fairy tales and the imaginative realm of architecture.  Houses in fairy tales are never just houses; they always contain secrets and dreams. This project presents a new path of inquiry, a new line of flight into architecture as a fantastic, literary realm of becoming.    Baba Yaga  Baba Yaga is one of the most impressive figures in Russian folklore. An old woman with witch-like powers, she flies in a huge mortar, using the the pestle as a rudder, or sometimes on a broomstick. Sometimes she kidnaps children — or, lost in the woods or great field, they come upon her hut and never return home. One can hardly think of Baba Yaga without envisioning her spectacular hut. In folklore, it is often adorned with bones and little skulls. Standing on chicken legs, it spins when she is angry. Though some versions of this ambiguous and poetic story imply that Baba Yaga eats children, this detail never is clear; in some scholarly interpretations, she is seen as a source of great consolation. The children who find the hut are often bewildered and seeking her counsel. As in many fairy tales, the magical hut may be associated with a yearning for home or for comfort. Some linguists have noted that baba, the Slavic word for grandmother or old woman, may be related to the word for pelican, one of the great birds of legend. Returning to her nest to find her infants dead, the pelican pierces her own breast and revives them with her blood. It is not much of a leap to imagine that Baba Yaga spins her house out of grief. Or perhaps she flies with her little lantern to seek her lost children. It is unfortunate that the tale of Baba Yaga is not more widely known.