![Giant Sculpture Made Of 1,500 Plastic Tiles Looks Like Digital Smoke [Video]](/multisite_files/codesign/imagecache/960/article_feature/ChangingRoom_lede.jpg "Giant Sculpture Made Of 1,500 Plastic Tiles Looks Like Digital Smoke [Video]")
Giant Sculpture Made Of 1,500 Plastic Tiles Looks Like Digital Smoke [Video]
Changing Room, by Easton+Combs, is made of more than 1,500 polycarbonate tiles slotted together to create what’s effectively a huge swatch of herringbone.
Easton+Combs, a small architecture office in New York, has sent us video of a cool new art installation at the Extension Gallery for Architecture in Chicago. Called Changing Room, it's a mass of more than 1,500 plastic tiles that, taken together, look like a pixely, diaphanous twin of the smoke monster hovering sinisterly on the ceiling of the art gallery.
Even scarier: Easton+Combs has started a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a video and photographs of performance artists interacting with the sculpture. So we get the smoke monster plus interpretive dance? Run! Run like hell!
Oh, we're just joshing. Besides, you don't have to like interpretive anything to enjoy the film, which shows how the architects went about making this thing. In short, they CNC-milled wing-shaped tiles from sheets of polycarbonate, slotted them together, then locked the tiles in place with a friction-held Plexiglas wedge. That created what Lonn Combs calls "a structural herringbone pattern that allows the shell to be self stabilizing and hold its form, yet also remain somewhat flexible.? The whole sculpture stretches about 15 feet wide and 10 feet tall, but weighs less than 300 pounds thanks to the lightness of the tiles and a dearth of additional structural support.
To fund the project, go here. For more on Easton+Combs, go here.
[Images courtesy of Easton+Combs]
