Last Friday architecture students ventured deep into MIT’s campus: down the infinite corridor to Hayden Library! It was a big change of scene from the typical one-minute walk between studio and La Verde’s, but food, fresh air, and an installation by two of our classmates beckoned.
The installation, Unblocked, is a project by Evelyn Ting and Shiyu Wei, two M.Arch students in their thesis semester.
Evelyn and Shiyu write this about the project:
Unblocked is a prototype for a new kind of pop-up exhibition space. Made from mylar, it is a lightweight system that can be pre-cut to specific geometries and stitched together offsite, and expanded and assembled onsite. Tension ties are used to preserve the expanded form, out of which a volume is carved to produce both an inhabitable space and a rippling texture in the facade when cut against the grain of the vertical cells. This specific installation is sited around Jacques Lipchitz’s 1950 bronze sculpture “Birth of the Muses,” and intends to prompt future pop-up spaces that can highlight MIT’s extensive public art collection on campus.
This project is funded by the MIT Department of Architecture and the Council of the Arts at MIT. Special thanks to the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Joel Lamere, Yungho Chang, Bumjin Kim, William Plunkett and Jim Harrington for your help and support.
These construction photos show the quick assembly on site:
Photos by Evelyn Ting, Susanna Pho, and Irina Chernyakova.
Arch_Kiosk 
This is great! Love how it looks like flowing cloth.
I would love to see a video to better visualize how this is assembled and “expanded”. Cheers!
I just loved your work, and now the pictures give it a knew dimension to me. I only want to add that even before the installation had been properly in place, I think that it was already an intervention in that space.
I’m saying this because, as a frequently visitor of Hayden, I first noticed the “oeuvre” since you let it the court, tied with some kind of cord … waiting to be assembled. Then, you scotch a little notice saying something that “this is not trash”, and finally the installation. Anyway…