Archinect - News

Meet the world's leading maze designer, Adrian Fisher

2017-06-05T15:07:00-04:00

Adrian Fisher is the world's leading maze designer, having created more than 700 mazes across 32 countries since 1979. "I really do love my job," says the 65-year-old. "It's like I'm a big kid, and creating things that people can play in all day long - who wouldn't want to do that?"

For 38 years, Adrian Fisher has been designing mazes from his southwest England-based studio. From classical hedges, to carnival mirrors with special effects, Fisher works with a variety of forms and in a variety of scales. His road to becoming the world's leading maze designer was unexpected. He began his career as an accountant while designing mazes as a hobby on the side. When he was 27, Lady Elizabeth Brunner wanted a maze built at her home and Fisher landed the gig. He now employs four permanent staff and typically works with 15 additional specialists, from animators to builders, at any given time.

Indian bar legally evades closure by adding 250-meter long maze entrance

2017-04-18T12:38:00-04:00

Since April 1 a large number of the bars, pubs and liquor shops across India has gone out of business, thanks to a Supreme Court order that the outlets should be at least 500m away from state and national highways...The Aishwarya Bar in North Paravoor, a Kochi suburb has built a 250m-long maze-like walkway to the entrance, theoretically making it more than 500m away from the highway.

In a move that has even delighted the bureaucrats who initially drafted the rule that no bar could be within 500 meters of a highway, an Indian bar has managed to stay in business by virtue of building a 250 meter long maze that, like the snaking lines at an amusement park, greatly expands the literal number of feet one must traverse to get to the bar's actual entrance. While this clever invention may necessitate a designated walker to help steer patrons back out, it ranks among the best architectural interpretations of law we've seen in some time. Cheers!

h/t bldgblog

George King installs glowing string maze in former train underpass for Detroit Design Festival

2015-10-12T13:30:00-04:00

Lasermaze is an architectural installation formed from three miles of UV wool and over 3000 hand tied knots, suspended from an industrial structure of steel scaffolding and chains. Created for the 2015 Detroit Design Festival, Lasermaze is currently located along the Dequindre Cut, a former railway line in Detroit that has been converted to a greenway and walking track.

Lasermaze’s playful structure invites visitors to get lost within a unique, surreal space as they journey towards the centre. The complex geometry of the form combined with the ethereal, semi-transparent nature of the walls adds to the challenge of this spatial puzzle. The dividing walls of the maze are formed from glowing string which creates a physical barrier but not an obviously visible one. Within the maze the layers of string and the barriers they form become almost imperceptible from each other, creating an overwhelming feeling of being lost within a distorted, surreal reality. In addition the unique glowing na...

Delve into The BIG Maze at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C.

2014-07-10T20:26:00-04:00

A life-size maze like the one BIG installed in partnership with the National Building Museum will attract plenty of attention, regardless if people know who BIG is or not. Constructed in the museum's iconic Great Hall, the maze was set up as an interactive sneakpeek for BIG's exhibition scheduled to open at the museum in January 2015.

As a follow-up to our previous mention of the maze, here's a little more detail behind it:

Check out a time-lapse video of the maze's construction below.

Get lost in BIG's human-scale maze

2014-07-03T13:23:00-04:00

The museum teamed up with international architecture firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group to construct a maze right in the Great Hall. [...] The museum’s “ubergoal is that people walk out of here looking at their built world differently,” Frankel says. “We think this is sort of on the microlevel of that — forcing people to look up [as they navigate the maze] will make them look at our building differently.”