Overgrown Tower

As a small project in my senior design studio, we were tasked with creating architectural sculptures - called “surrogates” - that reflected an aspect of a social movement - the “object”. I started from observing the aesthetics of suffragette and anti-suffragette memorabilia, which I distilled into the general concept of a grassroots movement overtaking an established system. This concept is reflected in the construction process of my surrogate, which I dubbed the Overgrown Tower. The Tower is a rigid structure of lasercut MDF components. The Overgrowth is a set of precisely lasercut and folded paper vines that attach onto notches in the Tower. When the MDF support structure is removed, the vines support the weight of the new Overgrown Tower, creating a flexible system that is stronger than before.