Paper Trails
is Bohlin Cywinski Jackson’s temporary public installation on First Avenue in downtown Seattle, Washington for Parking Day 2018. While interning with BCJ, my original proposed scheme was selected at an internal office pinup for executing for the event, and I led the design and fabrication of the project using 1000 recycled and recyclable cardboard tubes to create a public parklet, bench, and ring toss game.
Paper Trails is Bohlin Cywinski Jackson’s temporary public installation on First Avenue in downtown Seattle, Washington for Parking Day 2018. While interning with BCJ, my original proposed scheme was selected at an internal office pinup for executing for the event, and I led the design and fabrication of the project using 1000 recycled and recyclable cardboard tubes to create a public parklet, bench, and ring toss game.
As a temporary urban object, Paper Trails brings a sense of wonder and discovery to passers-by who don’t expect to find parking spaces have been turned into miniature parks for the day - much less a park made entirely of recycled cardboard. The design of the project was predicated around several factors: creating a visually interesting and engaging structure at a low-cost (under $1000) and without advanced digital fabrication tools at our disposal.
Additionally, the result is another contribution to the ongoing discussion of continuous (or “mass-customized”) versus discrete elements in emerging architecture. While the design favored discrete elements for ease of fabrication, utilizing a stopblock for a miter saw, it also was a conscious statement about the nature of parametricism and object-oriented ontology, in favor of a project whose logic is internal and which reveals latent characteristics over time and in different relations. We sought to create something greater than the sum of its parts, while the individual parts themselves are more than just points in a field, even as a utilitarian, everyday object like cardboard tubing.
