It's an enchanting sight. A thicket of enormous structures, towering 15 to 20 feet over visitors to the Northern Spark festival in Minneapolis, stands illuminated from below, each one a cross between an umbrella and a flower. Passing beneath their petals, park-goers wander through a magical place, as a park is turned into a fantastic landscape.
The project, called Night Blooms, is the work of Wil Natzel, an architect with a taste for the eclectically romantic and for unusual materials.
"My larger approach to architecture is embedded in the history of architectural ornamentation," he says, "As an alternative to a city filled with purely performative architecture" — being the boring walls, doors, stairs, pathways, and other bits that define the spaces we use.
Natzel says his approach to architecture is about mixing that history of ornamention with contemporary tools and materials, which is how we end up here, with a CNC knife cutting corrugated cardboard.
One of the biggest advantages of cardboard is that it's cheap. This is very useful if you're involved in making structures that will ornament a space for only a day. With that big benefit comes a number of drawbacks. There are obvious ones like the relative coarseness of the material and the tendency of the corn starch glue to come apart when it gets wet, but there are also more subtle issues, like a lack of working knowledge as to the material's properties.
"A normal packaging designer only deals with compressive strength of the material, the primary condition for stacking boxes up in a warehouse," says Natzel. His structures, on the other hand, end up pushing and pulling the material in a variety of unexpected directions. "I have had to really work to develop my own understanding of the material when I use it in tension."
To create the patterns, Natzel uses Rhino, a standard program in CAD-based industries. He designs the shapes and then uses the software to unfold the 3-D objects into flat patterns. Natzel says intimate knowledge of the properties of cardboard is key. Tolerances for construction are plus or minus 1/64 of an inch, which means having the knowledge to know how the flattened pattern will behave as it is assembled is required for the right degree of finesse. "I have a few small custom scripts I use to help, but the finishing touches are manually drawn in the software."
Even in creating his pieces, Natzel demonstrates a flair for the dramatic. Consider the method he used to generate interest in his work for the Northern Spark festival. He says he'd been trying to meet with Steve Dietz, director of Northern.Lights.mn and organizer of the festival. After a few e-mail exchanges and several failed attempts to schedule a meeting, Natzel decided to lure Dietz to see one of his installations. "At the last minute, I concocted an entire event just to entice him to come, hired a PR person, served food, and packed the place with friends," says Natzel, "And it worked."
With the attention generated by Night Blooms, Dietz likely does not regret the ruse. But for Natzel, the project gives more than just glory — it's helping him grow. "These ephemeral structures are leading me to a new understanding of the relationship between the temporal and permanent modes of architecture."
Photos: Courtesy Wil Natzel
