2013 Flat Lot Competition - Semi-Finalist - Exhibition: Flint Art Walk, April 14, 2013

Like the public pool, Big Top is a collector of individual summer adventures in public space. Conceived as a tensile double skin mesh woven from ¾” swimming pool rope the canopy provides a shaded flat lot and sprawling Big Top. Vertically scaffolds surrounding existing light fixtures and base footings at three parking space clusters define the mesh anchor points. Digital modeling and computational physics engines applied the tensile weaving forces on the mesh deriving the parabolic canopy.  The inverted pitched canopies into these courtyard stages allow aerial access for lounging and camaraderie. The rope mesh extends the full North-South length of flat lot along Saginaw with aims to extend the width of the street.

For spectators of summer events the canopy gives a birds-eye view from above or a shaded retreat below. When the sun goes down and the summer nights start an array of activated buoys affixed to the rope float above the lot to define space through light and sound. Small solar panels on the buoys nodes provide power to light the stages during evening events and wirelessly project sound through the lot to large crowds. When the summer days end and the Big Top comes down what will happen to the nearly ten miles of rope? We’d like to keep the summer fun going and cut and cap the rope into 6,500 jump ropes for the Flint community.