Pipe Dreaming

FESTA is Christchurch’s Festival of Transitional Architecture, initiated in 2012 as a way to reimagine a city in flux, finding its feet and redefining its spaces.

FESTA invited a team from Massey University School of Design to produce an installation for Lean Means, their 2016 night-time festival currated with a Superuse-ethos.

The team of student designers, assisted by myself and colleague Nick Kapica came up with Pipe Dreaming: a group of cardboard carpet cores suspended in a triangular form. They function as pavilion and/or folly and/or sculpture and at night they become a three-dimensional cinematic screen for a choreographed sequence of projections derived from re-using and re-thinking waste materials. The process is thus the content, folded-in or convoluted with the final pavilion/artwork.

Our installation seeks to wonder, is a sustainable future indeed a fanciful hope? Through the act of thinking creatively-dreaming can we bring new life to old materials and new life to the city in a state of flux?

The project was recognised with a global design award by SEGD and a DINZ Best Award in 2017.