Experiments of Content Affected Media
What I want to explore in my cardboard architecture is how the medium affects the content. Compared to normal design process in which designers build their prototype based on the sketches, I made changes and redefine the goals of my design in the process of building my prototypes. In my first prototype, I got my inspiration from the coast in Taiwan where the erosion of water and wind creates the unique shapes of rocks. I decided to build my architecture through vertical and horizontal cardboards so that the prototype shows the layers of eroded rocks. Although my initial motivation came from the seashore and rocks, the architecture in fact can easily fit into any environment. The organic shape of the architecture keeps the cardboard away from its conventional perception – sharp edges and flat surface. Instead, I made cardboard’s easy-to-bend texture related to the coastal rocks’ eroded surface. The last frame of my cardboard architecture is the lighting. The variation of lighting offers the architecture a wide variety of shadows and brightness, which creates additional layers to the architecture. Overall I want my cardboard architecture inspire viewers new ways of living in which the boundary between the environment and the architecture disappears and both supplement each other.
In terms of the technical details in my process, I usually started with the biggest layer of my architecture and then expanded to the smaller ones. I did not make precise calculation prior to building my cardboard. Instead, I made adjustment and revision along the process of building my cardboard. This provided my model with a more hand-made texture due to the imperfect details and imprecise measurement. Furthermore, this approach also gives me the flexibility to redesign the cardboard during the development of my architecture. Sometimes after building up a few layers of the cardboard, I realized the other layers could be smaller or the angle between two cardboards could be bigger. Then I would either modify the previous cardboard by chopping the extra parts off or re-measure the rest of the cardboard design.
Before building my cardboard architecture, I researched the structure and the forms of different type of coastal rocks. During the stage of conceptual development, what I tried to figure out was how to utilize the cardboard to represent the form. In the second prototype, the rock in the image was tilted 45 degree; therefore, I also made the horizontal and vertical layers tilted 45 degree and tried maintaining it not falling to the ground. One of the possibilities for the designers to build future cardboard was to think about other alternative ways to combine the structure and the content. My architecture’s structure speaks for its own content instead of one following the other. What I would like to experiment with next is the folding and bending techniques in cardboard architecture. I want to explore how I can construct the form and structure even though I do not cut through holes on cardboard while fulfilling the theme of seashore which I want to convey to the viewers.
