Who needs LSD when the world has talented designers like Masakazu Shirane and Saya Miyazaki? Last year, the Japanese duo took on the challenge of creating a mind-bending environment inside of a shipping container — and did they ever succeed.
Garden is a huge origami-inspired kaleidoscope built of 1100 triangular mirrors that are connected by zippers. It’s big enough that you can walk inside for an immersive experience and small enough, well, small enough to fit in a shipping container.
“We wanted to create the world’s first zipper architecture,” Shirane explained to the bloggers at Spoon and Tamago. “In other words, this polyhedron is completely connected by zippers. And in order to facilitate even more radical change some of the surfaces open and close like windows.” Thanks to the ease of the zippers, the entire exhibit can be set up in just four hours.
The piece premiered at the Kobe Biennial’s shipping container challenge in 2013 and just won the CS Design Award. While Shirane and Miyazaki have been creating these kinds of pieces since 2007, they remain interested in pushing the boundary of zipper architecture. And now that zippers are seeing some solid innovation for the first time in a long time, the sky’s the limit. [Spoon and Tamago]
Images via CS Design Awards