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In the fall of 2005 Tiffany & Company hired
Ball-Nogues to create the environment for the gala event celebrating
the launch of its line of jewelry and accessories designed
by architect Frank Gehry. The happening took place on a closed
portion of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California. It featured
temporary constructions that filled the street, honored the
materiality of Gehry's early work, and reinforced the imagery
of Tiffany's new "body as landscape" advertising campaign.
Ball-Nogues devised walls, furniture, and bars for the event.
One wall structure, half a block long to form an elegant backdrop,
curved like the human body and was constructed from 4000 layers
of corrugated cardboard sandwiched together. "Peep show" type
display windows, inspired by Marcel Duchamp's Étant
Donnés, punctuated the wall, framing tightly cropped
compositions of live, naked models wearing the Gehry designed
jewelry. In addition to creating walls, twenty-four voluptuous
ottomans, no two alike, invited the 600 guests to explore
playful new ways of sitting.
The assembly processes used to make the natural brown surfaces
elaborate on those Gehry employed in his legendary "Easy Edges"
line of furniture in the 1970's. These sensuous forms that
resembled slices of rolling topography grew from a manufacturing
process created by Ball-Nogues. The entire project required
laminating over 25,000 strips of curved, industrially cut
corrugated cardboard. Incredibly strong and capable of supporting
the weight of several people, the cardboard laminates operate
more like shells (integrating structure and skin) rather than
surfaces - which need the support of a skeletal armature.
The pieces reorient the viewer's notions of common cardboard
from a raw packaging material to a substance with structural
potential at an architectural scale, capable of being used
to fashion elegantly refined compound curving forms.
Designers and Principals in Charge: Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues
Project Team: Sam Gehry, Jonathan Ward
Fabricator: Ethos Design |
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