Best of Year: Installation

Edie Cohen -- Interior Design, 12/1/2010 11:44:00 AM

Project: "Table Cloth"
Firm: Ball-Nogues Studio
Location: Los Angeles

Taking center stage at the University of California, Los Angeles, Table Cloth explored Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues’s ongoing interests in space modulation, pop-up architecture, and new uses for standard components. Yet this project went further. For the first time, the partners based a composition on repetitions of just a single object, more specifically a custom table with a top of Finnish plywood, coated in black resin, and three legs of turned maple. Linked with custom devices in steel or plywood, a process that took six staffers 10 days, the tables became a swath that could be draped from existing steel lintels on the brick facade of UCLA’s school of music. Tables higher up were upturned, their legs bristling. When the tables reached the ground, they flipped right-side-up and spilled outward. The result was eminently multipurpose. Sometimes it worked as a stage set for performances by a jazz ensemble or a string quartet. During the academic day, lectures took place there. Not to mention general hanging out.

Merit Winners:


Project: “Built to Wear”
Firm: Ball-Nogues Studio
Location: Hong Kong
Standout: Part of the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, this architecturally scaled suspended structure comprised 15,000 pieces of American Apparel clothing.


Project: “Schuff-Perini Climber”
Firm: Ganymede Design Group
Location: Phoenix
Standout: Found objects dot this three-story steel “dreamscape” at the Children’s Museum of Phoenix, encouraging children and adults to climb.


Project: “Route D”
Firm: CL3 Architects
Location: Hong Kong
Standout: Bamboo poles painted Chinese red composed a free-span bridge and canopy.