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Rice Gallery commissioned this installation
in collaboration with The Museum Fine Arts in Houston exhibition,
The Modern West: American Landscape, 1890-1950. When the Gallery
director mentioned a Modern West tie-in before we had settled
on an approach to the project we realized that the notion
of landscape and geological phenomena dovetailed with our
design for Tiffany and Company’s Frank Gehry Jewelry
Launch Gala on Rodeo Drive in 2006. In the Tiffany project,
the jewelry maker’s “body as landscape”
ad campaign informed our approach to creating laminated cardboard
walls and ottomans. At Rice, we expanded the potential of
constructing landscapes in cardboard to include the viewer’s
physical participation. We invited visitor exploration by
extending the casual social terrain of the campus into the
gallery, transforming it into a traversable rolling playground.
On any given day one might discover a group of gallery goers
studying, snoozing, climbing, sliding down the rolling terrain,
or making-out in one of the darkened recesses below the cardboard
shells.
Rip Curl Canyon was a kind of mythical
location in the American West where land and water collide,
far from Houston’s flat drained swamps. From its highest
point at the rear of the gallery, its steep, crevice-like
formations sloped down and gained momentum before breaking
apart to form ribbons of curling waves. Like rip currents
– narrow, fast moving belts of water – the segments
twisted and surged toward the front glass entry wall. The
view through the glass provided only glimpses of the unfolding
topography beyond and invited the visitor to probe deeper.
The steady climbing exploring caused the raw cut cardboard
to slowly compress with each footstep…over time this
accumulation developed into subtle pathways.
The fabrication processes used to make the
natural brown laminates are in the lineage of those Gehry employed
in his legendary "Easy Edges" line of furniture
in the 1970's. Expanding on this knowledge enabled us
to create architecturally scaled cardboard structures and
introduce double curvature. A study in twisting identical parts rather than sculpting surface. We used the properties and
limitations of the material – determined through building
full scaled mock-ups during development combined with a parametric
digital interface - to shape the cardboard – ribbons.”
The project required laminating over 20,000 strips (weighing
approximately eight tons) of curved, industrially cut
corrugated cardboard in twelve days. Incredibly strong and
capable of supporting the weight of several people, the cardboard
laminates operate as semi-monocoques with an intermediary
plywood armature. The armature was made of standard wood materials
– 2 x 4s and plywood – individually cut and CNC
routered offsite to conform to the varying dimensions and
curvature of the undulating cardboard shells. We digitally
developed a language of slotting connections so that these
non-standard parts came together like a giant puzzle in four
days, required very little structural decision making in the
field and gave us the freedom to make improvised choices when
installing the cardboard.
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