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.

Crumple Zone

TYPE Installation
STATUS Commission, Built
LOCATION London, UK
YEAR 2004
CLIENT Factio 

DESIGN TEAM Eva Castro, Annelie Giencke, Ulla Hell, Holger Kehne, Christian Täubert

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.