Ideas Spring Forth: Chrysalis - A Photographic Journey

For those visiting for the first time this post summarizes the Chrysalis design process in one photo heavy stream and incorporates most of the photos posted previously. More to come.

Twelve people variously interested in mobile architecture, design, collaborative work, art, environmental design all met for the first time in early 2011 to start a 5 day Workshop with New York based artist Mary Mattingly, a deceptively quiet young woman who is astoundingly prolific and in town for 2 weeks as part of a residency. After Day 1 five people returned and, meaningful or not, all were women, most knew how to sew, and by occupations were artists, architect, writer, landscape architect in training, seamstress.

People were willing to put time in on this project for different reasons. Mine were that I enjoy collaborative work with interesting people and that this project met my criteria of having to be low cost, low barrier (except for time), conceptual, and could be documented online and result in an object or idea that could be transferable to other projects.

On Day one Mary showed and discussed some of the ideas she had about mobile architectural and these are detailed in this post.

(All photographs in this next section were taken by Raven Girl Photography)

We began sketching ideas and decided to use days 2 - 5 to make a prototype of a single section.

There was a lot of sewing construction after we opted to try and make a section for eveyrone to take with them to continue to work on. Rebecca Erickson sewing.

Mary cutting and measuring silicone treated cloth.

Seat belt webbing donated by Janet Morton and cut to size for each section.

Notes on what to do next.

More sewing, ripping and resewing. Morgan Crowley (foreground) and Rebecca Erickson

Each section was 14' long and 8'wide, double walled and edged in seatbelt webbing and industrial velcro. Morgan Crowley wearing.

Once we got to the last day we had a section cut out and partially completed of what we were now calling a Chrysalis for each participant. We were not sure what we would do with them and most people rolled their up and put it away. I was looking for another project and decided to push forward with investigating what I could do with this fold-able "sculpture"

A lean to type tent. We added three channels for tent poles with the idea that these would hold the structure up if 6 sections were attached to each other.