The Crumple Zone

London, Great Britain

Photo © Peter Guenzel

Art + Installation + Exhibition

Architects: Plasma Studio

Location: London, Great Britain
Year: 2004
Client: Factio
Design Team: Eva Castro, Annelie Giencke, Ulla Hell, Holger Kehne, Christian Täubert

Crumple Zone, a site-specific installation is utilising CNC-punchpressed steel with projected imagery to create a piece that challenges the preconceptions of the Vitruvian principles of stability, utility and beauty in the inaugural exhibition by Factio, a not-for profit curatorial collective created to support a dia-logue within British fashion, art, design and architecture.

Bypassing the typically linear process of design followed by construction, and reversing traditional skeleton structural systems Plasma Studio programmed a pile of standard industrial sheet steel with information in the form of perforated seams. As in recent automotive strategies, the seemingly weakened material organization enables a formation of global stress distribution lines achieving a different kind of structural performance.

The sheet material turned form through the negotiation of overall curatorial organization, the site and structural form-finding. Still, it mirrors traditional architectural works in expanding from the subservant function of providing surface and backdrop for the other exhibits to its own inherent discussion.

While the piece is derived from a rigorous set of proportional relationships, these merely differentiate the material consistency to direct the reciprocal forces within the process of production. A contemporary aesthetic discussion stems from the embedded interrelationships, the sensuality of forms liberated from straightjacket Cartesian rules and its weightless appearance.