PaperVillain, Cambridgeshire, The Functionality
Rebelling against the throw-away lifestyle of the (printed) daily read, The Functionality collected the discarded free newspapers of London’s Underground and made them into shelter for the Secret Garden Festival in the English countryside.
Over three weeks, 17 pairs of hands individually folded 2,542 traditional paper hats from an equal mix of titles London Lite and London Paper. Together these paper hats formed an articulated tensile canopy used during the festival.
The architects say: “The global shape of the PaperVillain was derrived from a series of physical prototypes in which gravity was allowed to naturally distort each hat into a unique form. The design process of the project was excited by a iterative dialog between the digital and handmade, and as hours of folding became days; we became increasingly familiar with the limits of the material under tension and the demanding logistics of the fabrication process.”
