Sunday, 6 August 2006 | Levent OZLER
Ball-Nogues Design the Frank Gehry Gala for Tiffany & Company
Last fall Tiffany & Company hired Los Angeles architecture, industrial design and fabrication firm Ball-Nogues to create the environment for Frank Gehry's gala party celebrating the launch of Gehry's signature jewelry designs.
Held on a closed portion of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills the production featured temporary constructions that filled the street, created spectacle, and honored the materiality of Gehry's early work. Designers Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues developed a new manufacturing process using corrugated cardboard to create voluptuous curved walls, furniture, and bars for the event. They were inspired by the process and material Gehry employed in his legendary "Easy Edges" furniture of the 1970's.
Ball-Nogues designed and oversaw the construction of walls and furniture that required laminating over 25,000 strips of curved, industrially cut cardboard. A wall structure, half a block long and curved like the human body, was constructed from 4000 strips of cardboard sandwiched together. "Peep show" display windows, inspired by Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés, punctuated the wall. Tightly framed views of live nude models, wearing nothing but the Gehry jewelry, served as living "body as landscape" advertisements. Twenty-four ottomans, no two alike and distributed across the event space, invited 600 guests to explore alternative ways of sitting.
The lamination method developed for the project represents another direction in the material and process derived explorations of Ball-Nogues, whose airy Mylar tensile vortex Maximilian's Schell last year became an instant icon in Los Angeles, garnered international media attention, received an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects and won I.D. Magazine's Annual Design Review "Best of Category for Environments," 2006.
Incredibly strong and capable of supporting the weight of several people, the laminates operate like shells (integrating structure and skin) rather than surfaces - which need the support of a skeletal armature. The pieces reorient the viewer's notions of standard corrugated cardboard from a raw packaging material to a substance with structural potential at an architectural scale and capable of being used to fashion sensuous compound curving forms that resemble wood sculpted with a computer controlled (CNC) router.
Ball-Nogues will further explore the use corrugated cardboard at the Rice University Art Gallery in Houston in an installation that will be on view from September 21 through October 29 2006.
For more information visit http://www.ball-nogues.com or http://www.ricegallery.org
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