Constructing agency 2016-2018

Soul of pyramids

Studio Theodore Spyropoulos

Tutors  Mostafa El-Sayed, Apostolos Despotidis

Team Ziqian Wang(China), Fei Zheng(China), Weihan Chang(China) 

This project is a response to the design brief Rethinking Centre Pompidou which explores how behavior-based design methods can be used to reconsider cultural projects for today through the development of self-aware and self-structuring practices that see architecture as an infrastructure to address latency and change. 

By thinking the different forms between the current contemporary exhibition and the previous ones. We aim to bring people, including exhibition curators, artists and visitors, a new exhibition method that is adaptable to the latest political, cultural, ideological and technological development.

Inspired by sci-fi movies that illustrate futuristic scenarios and the developments in cybernetics, artificial intelligence and information technologies, we believe that the future exhibition will longer be constrained in a rigid process of curating and arrangements, instead it will more likely to be amorphous and dematerialized. Our idea is to implement hologram as media to replace traditional physical collections with virtual ones for exhibitions. 

Our research began with 11 different ways of unfolding a cube into 6 pyramids. Following very simple transformation rules, each single cube could be unfolded into multiple variants. Those geometrically unique shapes could be aggregated both horizontally and vertically to increase the combinatorial multiplicity. As containers of virtue exhibitions, those self-organized units are designed to distributed into cities. What’s more, they can be considered as city’s infrastructure and they can adapt to different scenarios by either changing the numbers or the combination patterns. 

We also explored several possible ways that could be used to generate stable and clear hologram. For the content of hologram which is also related to curating, we introduced a new system based on users’ decision. We expect that this decentralized curating network could eliminate the stereotypical meritocratic aesthetic taste and bring exhibitions into every possible corner of the city.