monstrous!

The only thing better than public art made out of tape, is public art made out of tape that you can inhabit. This "Tape Melbourne" project by Numen/For Use design collective is the perfect combination of bizarre and interactive. The textured translucency of the shell created by varying layers of the tape (it looks like packing wrap to us) creates an organic appearance as if a mutant funnel spider has made home in Melbourne's new art galleries. We imagine those who balk at its appearance are soon won over by a crawl around inside. Silliness taken seriously. What if our homes, and parks, and offices had more spaces conducive to play and playful thinking?

We also wonder how much this whole structure weighs? Another of their tape projects weighs just 86kg (190lbs) and doesn't appear to be much smaller. It certainly borrows support from its building hosts, but this is a dramatic example of the efficiency of tension and compound curved surfaces to create usable forms with minimal material.

We could also imagine the development possibilities of these interstitial webs where whole tertiary spaces are created between buildings to serve tertiary programs and constructed in a week for $2 a square foot (or maybe these are better tracked by the cubic foot?) Numen/For Use has other examples of their cocoon creations in Germany, Serbia and Austria on their site that are worth checking out.