Torino, IT | New York, NY
Instant Installation of Catherine Tiazzoldi represented Federlegno furniture at the 2013 edition of Made Expo, hosting the projects of the competition Instant House @ School. This exhibition of the competition, whose jury included MOMA curator Pedro Gadagno, presented more than 250 projects from all countries around the world.
Quick to install, the project Instant Installation was conceived as an "almost pocket" installation which can be carried in a windsurfing bag. Instant Installation explores the idea of physical enclosure and the relationship to social interaction and challenges the boundary between a product and architecture with its capacity to generate, articulate, and transform spaces. Realized with a parametric technique and a computer numeric control manufacturing process that quickly produces prefabricated customized rails, Instant Installation seeks out the architectural capacity to adapt and be reconfigured for different uses and locations.
As a space articulator, Instant Installation defines and organizes public and semipublic spaces, creating an adaptive boundary between spatial interiority and urban exteriority. It was designed as a maze of colored rubber wires which can be twisted in different ways to create different spaces each time it is utilized. The environment in which the configuration of geometry and layering of materiality are conceived to encourage and to solicit visitors' curiosity and reaction. In this way, Instant Installation is a spatial generator; a playful environment inviting visitors to play with the vibrancy of rubber layering, to move in an exhilarating non-orientable space continuously revealing and hiding the presence of other people.
As a customized product, Instant Installation allows for each user to select a nesting technique for the strings, and define their own level of transparency, enclosure and privacy. In this way, it can adapt itself as a meeting room or lounge room for a public event. Instant installation responds to the many issues of design complexity in a complex-structured city in which the interactions among parts intensify, the number of decision makers and cultural scenarios overlap, interconnect, and collide, and in which the temporal dimensions of the citizens are dissimilar.
Status: Built
Location: Milano Made Expo, Italy
Firm Role: Author
Additional Credits: Team: Elizabeth Irene Benson, Fabrizio Garda, Francesco Bricchi