Cobalt Muffin
Cobalt Muffin is an original artwork especially designed for Shanghai Yuyuan Road by YokYok in 2019 and comissioned by CREATER. It is the first installation in China by the studio. The artwork takes place in 1107 Yuyuan road Shanghai in the Changning district. It will be exhibited from October 1st 2019 to 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 awell balanced and active neighboorhood.
The lot is intended to host events as encounters, talks, and other kind of public invitations that can take place under the Cobalt Muffin during these 10 months exhibition.
Cobalt Muffin acts as a geometric presence floating over the lawn. Its apparent complexity is actually made of 60 similar triangles, covered with a semitransparent 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 lift 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, it offers itself to all as a 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.
Project details
Design: Atelier YokYok
Project Location: Yuyuan Road, Shangai, China
Built: 2019
Typology: Installation
Structure: SHEY
Engineering: RED ingénieurs
Curatorship: Zin Productions
Atelier YokYok
YokYok is an artistic design studio founded in 2009 by three architects. It is today composed by Samson Lacoste, Luc Pinsard, Laure Qarémy and Pauline Lazareff. The work of YokYok takes place between art and architecture, around human body, materials and sensitive experience. Keen of installations to be experimented in a playful way, YokYok proposes interactive, and unexpected architectural curiosities. YokYok creates artworks and installations in various contexts as festivals, museums, gardens, public squares or architectural projects. He likes to tell stories, to forge an imagination and to look at new places with poesy. The Atelier is open minded and it happens to associate with other knowledges in order to explore new horizons.