Paris studio Atelier YokYok has unveiled a new site-sepficic installation in Shanghai. Dubbed Cobalt Muffin, the artwork is located on Yuyuan road in Shanghai’s Changning district, and will be on view until July 1st 2020.
The Yuyuan road is the main axis of a dynamic area that promotes art and creation city-wide. This lively area counts numerous shops, fashion stores, art galleries, offices, restaurants and housing. This diverse typology makes it a well balanced and active neighboorhood.
Cobalt Muffin acts as a geometric presence floating over the lawn. Its apparent complexity is actually made of 60 similar triangles, covered with a semi-transparent skin made of elastic ropes.
The big volume, floating as a cloud over the visitors becomes light and immaterial. As a kite or a lantern, it levitates above the ground in a apparent lightweight.
Inviting the people to observe it and walk around, it offers a bright and colorful dialog between geometry and materiality, rethinking the borders between art and architecture.
Its volumetry is the result of an hemisphere of a «rhombicosacron polyhedra». Poles extend the edges of this dome and li it up at 2m20 above ground. 7,5km of rope has been used to realize this installation, as well as a tubular metalic structure in order to resist tension, time and weather.
As for the “Shooting Vaults” in 2015, YokYok wanted to play with volumes and materiality. However this time the context was not used to generate the project’s shape, YokYok created a singular object, a geometric surprise in the urban landscape. Simultaneously precious by its color and generous by the space it occupies, if offers itself to all as popular candy. Its transparency and lightness contrasts with its straight edges and volume. Finally, it talks about architecture as a filter that plays with materiality.