Recently, a friend and I felt ambitious enough to take on a design competition. We’ve been restless to flex our creative chops since leaving school. Knowing how hard it would be to focus on something that's not work, we set our sights on a small competition that felt more approachable. It’s a playhouse design competition hosted by an architecture blog I follow: “Life of an Architect.”
We’d been been passing back and forth joke ideas for a little bit, and I thought I’d share some of those ideas at their various stages of development.
The Shigeru Shack
Since it’s an architecture competition, I thought a miniature Shigeru Ban tribute of paper tube construction might be simple (and timely considering he just won the Pritzker.)
I really like the idea of paper tubes since they’re so available as a material. Also, I really want to get some straws and a hot glue gun build a bunch of tiny straw shacks. Design is serious business you guys. On that note…
House of Cake
My partner sent me this idea for a cake house (on my birthday no less, how thoughtful.) This may look like just a drawing of a cake, but every idea counts when brainstorming. After thinking about it for a bit, I actually started to see some potential to doing a cake house.
Maybe we were just hungry, but we continued with the food theme until we arrived at Cup Cakes.
We nearly committed ourselves to the idea, but couldn’t think of a way to do the icing, and really, what’s a cupcake without icing? just a small muffin, that’s what.
Recently, we met in person to hash out an “actual” idea. It turned into a brainstorm session which looked realistically at each of our joke ideas.
We like the economy of the Shigeru-shack, and I even whipped up a concept SketchUp model, but the idea would take some time to properly develop. For now, we’ve opted for simplicity and plan to submit a dice-house. Maybe call it the “gamble house” (a play on a famous piece of architecture near LA.) It’s a working title.
Part 2