Your bi-monthly source of the latest products.

The <i>Artichoke</i> seat. Photography: Sarah Rowlands.

The <i>Houses</i> fragment. Photography: Sarah Rowlands.

The <i>Landscape Architecture Australia</i> hills. Photography: Sarah Rowlands.

The <i>Architecture Australia</i> tower. Photography: Sarah Rowlands.

Design Media in Australia exhibition

A dynamic installation by Toby Horrocks reimagines Architecture Media titles as 3D cardboard forms.

Showing at the Gallery of Australian Design in Canberra during August and September, the exhibition Design Media in Australia invited popular Australian design titles – including Architecture Australia, Houses, Artichoke and Landscape Architecture Australia – to create a freestanding installation that would enable gallery visitors to interact with the content of the magazines. Each title was allocated a maximum space of 1.8 m × 1.8 m.

Using corrugated fibreboard fabricated by Visy, Toby Horrocks of Freefold Furniture created an installation for Architecture Media’s four design titles. The cardboard pieces interlocked at right angles to create three-dimensional forms. With refined and deliberate edges, the cardboard structure created undulating shapes of landscapes, buildings, furniture and dwellings.

The installations began as a computer-modelled arch – a basic architectural figure – that was stretched, twisted, squashed and pulled to create an abstract icon representing each magazine.

The Architecture Australia piece was a scale model of a tower with horizontal planes suggesting floor plates. The Artichoke seat represented the magazine by alluding to a bench seat and table, its organic form a visual pun on the word artichoke. The Houses fragment had 1:1 scale steps cut out of it – a human-scaled domestic object. The Landscape Architecture Australia hills were smoothly contoured like a hillside, the spikes recalling miniature trees.

The resulting collection was an inventive reimagining of these highly respected titles as three-dimensional cardboard forms and a demonstration of the possibilities in using cardboard as a design material.