Periscope

PERISCOPE is the winner of the 10UP! National Architecture Competition designed by Brandon Clifford & Wes Mcgee, founders of Matter Design Studio. It’s an inhabitable installation with iconic implications to advocate bold architecture for the Atlanta community and young designers across the globe.

Here is a description of the project by the designers…

Charged with the task of design­ing a rapidly deploy-able, tem­po­rary instal­la­tion, on a lim­ited bud­get, with a lim­ited plot — we pro­pose a tower of foam.  Through ver­ti­cal expan­sion via the omis­sion of a ver­ti­cal restric­tion, this tower will engage a broader audi­ence, invit­ing them to the event sim­i­lar to search­lights in the night sky.

Fab­ric Rhetoric

At first glance, the tower appears to be a ten­sile fab­ric pulled ver­ti­cally by com­pres­sive rods, much in the same way a one con­ceives a deploy-able tent.  In fact, the tower func­tions in oppo­si­tion to the ini­tial read­ing.  Where the eye reads ten­sile fab­ric is truth­fully com­pres­sive foam, and the com­pres­sive rods are actu­ally per­form­ing as ten­sile cables.  This rhetor­i­cal inver­sion invites spec­ta­tors in for closer inspec­tion to find the tower is not con­structed of thin sur­faces at all, but rather carved from solid blocks of EPS foam.  Upon dis­cov­er­ing this illu­sion, the spec­ta­tor observes their first glimpse into the means and meth­ods of fab­ri­ca­tion that make the tower possible.

Foam

EPS foam is the back­bone to this design.  This foam is 90% air by vol­ume, mean­ing it is inher­ently vol­u­met­ric, inex­pen­sive, and light­weight.  In addi­tion to these qual­i­ties, EPS foam con­tains no CFC’s and is 100% recyclable/reusable.

Foam is so also extremely light­weight, mean­ing few peo­ple can han­dle large assem­blies.  This premise responds to the com­pe­ti­tion brief’s require­ment for a struc­ture that can be rapidly deployed with a min­i­mal num­ber of work­ers.  This pro­posal takes advan­tage of larger than life size build­ing blocks to achieve a quickly con­structed, and rel­a­tively large installation.

A com­mon cri­tique of many dig­i­tal fab­ri­ca­tion exer­cises is the enor­mous mate­r­ial waste.  We take this con­cern very seri­ously. Beyond the effi­ciency of unit nest­ing, the meth­ods of fab­ri­ca­tion (robotic hotwire) pro­duces no kerf waste and the min­i­mal waste pro­duced in start­ing and stop­ping a stock block pro­duce 100% recy­clable mate­r­ial.  The research and devel­op­ment behind the means and meth­ods of fab­ri­ca­tion speak to our approach to design – reci­procity between draw­ing and making.

year: 2010
design team: bran­don clif­ford, wes mcgee, dave pigram
struc­tural: matthew john­son
build team: bran­don clif­ford, wes mcgee, maciej kaczyn­ski, johanna lob­dell, deniz mcgee, kris wal­ters
rig­ging: tier­son boutte
fab­ri­ca­tion: uni­ver­sity of michi­gan taub­man col­lege of archi­tec­ture and urban plan­ning
client: mod­ern atlanta 10up com­pe­ti­tion