Feel It, Take It
Andrew Lyon, Colin Harris, Tom Beresford, William Trossell and Nick Wood
Can we disperse a ceiling, piece by piece, across a city? We’d like to think so. The Functionality has designed a new scarf--140 of them, in fact. Our new installation Feel It, Take It is composed of 140 distinct cnc-cut recycled felt scarves designed to nest together and transform into a shell-like wool finished ceiling. At the closing party the space is disrobed and each uniquely numbered scarf is removed from above and given to a partygoer. By the end of the evening the installation will metamorphose into personal fashion. Leaving on the shoulders of people visiting the installation the scarves are disseminated out of the gallery and into the city.
Feel It, Take It takes an everyday product sold by street vendors and “hot rods” it into an architectural surface. Using procedural modeling software, we were able to digitally prototype the installation by analyzing the hanging span of each scarf, and letting gravity do the rest. We avoided the physical production of construction and fabrication drawings altogether. Rather, we used only the digital model to coordinate the fabrication and installation of the tensile support and the membrane of scarves.
This installation integrates a ceiling system with a method for distributing elements of thermal comfort. When the installation ends, we want the material we used to avoid the landfill and to find its way into the lives and onto the bodies of people walking on streets, riding on subways, hailing cabs. Can we design multiple purposes into one system? When it's cold, everyone needs a scarf when there's no roof overhead.
We would like to thank Michael Blancato, Raymond Adams, Brad Blondes, Jiminie Ha and Rebecca Gimenez.
For a piece of Feel It, Take It send a self addressed stamped envelope to W/--- Projects at 141 Division Street
New York NY 10002.
