Many Small Cubes

The installation stood in a historic public garden during a contemporary art fair. It was commissioned by a gallery to open a series of small nomadic houses, demountable structures that explore portable dwelling, and it was the design team’s first work in the city.

A steel frame clad in anodised aluminium forms cubes of different sizes, stacked into a cloud about 10 m high. The cubes touch only at an edge or a corner, so the whole mass seems to hover above the ground, and some of them hold plants and small trees.

The floating volumes create a new experience of space, a rhythm of flickering light and shadow like sunlight through leaves. The piece carries on the team’s search for an architecture between the geometric and the organic, closer to nature. At night, a light artist projected abstract patterns and numbers onto one side of the cubes.