Design Principals: Claus Benjamin Freyinger, Andrew Holder
Project Team: Jesus Aguilar, Courtenay Bauer, Amanda McGough, Paul Cambon, Dan Cuadra
Type: Design Study
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Year: 2008
Status: Realized

Chicago-based Trap Door Theater Company commissioned a set design and installation for a production of "The Unconquered," a contemporary piece by Scottish playwright Torben Betts. The project used the 1950's idyll setting of the company's production as a point of departure to wrap the stage in a large shell-like form reminiscent of the futurist structural experiments of mid-century avant-garde architecture.

The research agenda for the project posed two material and structural questions. First, how can an inexpensive, non-rigid sheet material like paper or plastic be used to create occupiable volumes at the scale of architecture? Second, how can structural performance be linked to aesthetic and spatial qualities so that a normally invisible property like rigidity can be seen and felt? At a small scale, flexible plastic sheets are folded to make semi-rigid modules. The modules were then joined together in a "grid shell" mat that reacted to the forces applied to it by becoming more rigid the more it was bent and twisted to fit the form of the theater. Made of more than 1,000 of the small-scale plastic modules, the piece produced a shifting set of spatial and chromatic qualities across the surface as it deformed: transitioning from spiny to floral to foggy.