The Element

Based on the winning scheme for the SCI-Arc Café and Board Room Competition held in 2003, this sculptural installation highlights its foremost prototypical “element,” a fluid composite object-surface with sensual and tactile effects. By casually extruding the library stacks into the café, a sequence of seating booths, tables, and furniture pieces emerge, creating a playful micro-architecture that operates in close proximity with the systems and forces that give shape and rhythm material life.

An element is an essential physical and behavioral component of a complex entity. But The ELEMENT is the system itself, a fluid composite of variant surfaces modulating space. Conceptually, the object could be described as a social interface, a composite contact surface supporting thresholds between adjacent regions, bodies, materials, and substances; a segmented space at which independent systems and diverse social groups interact.

Situated between sculpture and architecture, as in the artworks of Tony Cragg or Richard Deacon, The ELEMENT requires closer scrutiny of its visual and tactile aspects. Specifically, The ELEMENT consists of a monolithic MDF grid-shell armature clad with ABS white plastic skin panels, embedded plastics seating booths, and fiberglass monocoque tables that generate a complex spatial transition from a regular library stack system into a rhythmic, branching, bending array of continuous furniture.