Flatland: An Installation at Gund Hall by Casey Hughes and Hiroshi Jacobs

Depending on where and how you look at it, the cords can either look immaterial or very material, weightless or heavy, soaring or constrained.

Like most schools of architecture, the GSD has a tradition of students installing projects in and around the building. Some of these last longer than others, and some are better thought-out and executed than others. Some are not installations at all, but just crumbling pieces of projects or works-in-progress that got left behind and that people were too lazy to remove and dispose of properly.

In this context, Flatland--designed by recent M.Arch.II grad Casey Hughes and developed and installed in collaboration with Hiroshi Jacobs and others--raises the bar. Depending on where and how you look at it, the cords can either look immaterial or very material, weightless or heavy, soaring or constrained.

The design, selected through a school-wide competition, features red and blue bungee cords spanning between pairs of metal cables, creating a geometry that varies from a pure hyperbolic paraboloid (a "hypar") only through the force of gravity acting on the elastic cords and relatively inelastic cables. In terms of its exploitation of geometry, attention to material properties, and (appropriately simple but crisp) detailing, Flatland also exemplifies many of the design values that typify the GSD's M.Arch. programs in recent years.

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