Vines of corten steel
The Vanished House in Wuhan by Field Conforming Studio
© Jin Weiqi
In the beginning was the sketch, at the end the laser cutter. For this delicate house sculpture of Corten steel, the architects from Field Conforming Studio used the entire palette of analog and digital design methods. The installation was created for the second East Lake International Sculpture Biennale in Wuhan, a city in central China.
© Jin Weiqi
The setting – of all places – was Wuhan’s Shimenfeng Cemetery, a memorial space laid out like a park. There, as the dead are remembered, the Vanished House will be a shadowy reminder of a traditional residence with a saddle roof and chimney. The guiding idea behind the design was an ivy-covered house, but without the house. Instead, there is merely a vegetable shell, in this case made of 2-cm-thick plates of Corten steel.
The design started with a cardboard model of the installation at a scale of 1:10, onto which the architects sketched the stylized ivy in pencil. The most labour-intensive part of the process came next: the transferral of the hand-drawn sketches, which had been scanned from the model, into vector paths on a computer.
© Jin Weiqi
This work proved quite cumbersome; indeed, the architects had to pay particular attention to the material thicknesses at the crossing points of the “branches”. The architects went with Corten steel for two reasons: its colour, which nicely echoes the shade of natural branches, and its stability, for no further subconstruction was required.
© Field Conforming Studio
Over time, the steel surface will darken, and the graphic character of the steel ivy shell will become even more pronounced.
Architecture: Field Conforming Studio (Hu Quanchun, Xiang Yu, Chen Songlin)
Location: Wuhan Shimenfeng Memorial Park, Wuhan (CN)
Exhibition organisation: Zhi Art Space, Hubei Museum of Art, United Art Museum
Size: 9,8 m × 5,1 m × 4,8 m
Gallery
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