IN/FLUX

IN/FLUX was designed as a response to a call for proposals to build a temporary installation made of custom designed mushroom blocks, built in a material developed by Ecovative.

Parametric design is increasingly thought of as a process that occurs in the black box of a computer processor. The making of architecture then becomes twofold: design and form-giving occurs in a digitally unconstrained and isolated sandbox, while building occurs in a more constrained and interconnected physical reality. These constraints, however, may form the basis of an analog parametric design - one that takes place materially at full scale. IN/FLUX is intentionally (un)designed as an analog parametric tool that acts as an interactive form-finding experiment where visitors have the opportunity to directly shape the architecture, thereby conflating the dichotomy between designing and building.

Tectonically, IN/FLUX was built and behaved much more as a semi-rigid fabric rather than a conventional block construction.  As such, the spatial configuration and form of the piece was found during the construction and assembly process. As pieces of the installation were stitched together, the wall membrane had to be pushed, pulled, and curved to find configurations that were self-supporting. The construction process became a conversation between the builders and the wall itself, each influencing the other’s desires and subsequent reactions. IN/FLUX was intentionally soft and malleable, and throughout its life pleated and slumped to find its own structurally stable equilibria as visitors interacted with it, developing into an ongoing physical discussion between people and their environment.