Design Village is an annual architectural competition held at Cal Poly SLO. Teams of students from participating colleges and universities are presented with a theme to develop ideas about how to design their competing structure. The weekend of the competition, team's are required to physically carry their materials into the experimental structures lab behind Cal Poly's campus; then, build and live in their structures over the course of the weekend.
Make.Move.Play. was the theme for the 2013 Design Village competition.
Make.: A “box within a box” became the central concept. As a material, we wanted to test cardboard’s structural integrity - the entirety of the structure became cardboard. The system in which made this feat possible was bringing individually cut pieces together by plugging them inside one another to create one cohesive, monolithic structure. This system helps to distribute weight evenly and provides for a rigid build.
Move.: The structure conveys movement via the undulations in its form - the different height of the walls and the different lengths in the floor and roof pieces abstractly simulate the wavy form of the corrugation of cardboard.
Play.: Cardboard is a very playful and easily manipulative material. The assembly of the structure became an act of “play” in itself - each component was designed in a way similar to a Lego brick - an extrusion in one piece connects with a hole in another, helping to align each section together.
After the competition, we were asked to display our structure at Sacramento's GOOD: Street Food+Design Market. There we represented a newly started organization, SacDigiFab. Our structure has been used to display the possibilities of "pop-up architecture."
A great thanks to:
Elton Fong
Trenton Inoue
Christian Medina
Jason Silva, our mentor
American River Packaging, for donation of materials
and John Ellis, our Advising Professor
