SHAGG
San Fernando, California, USA
Installation Proposal (Shortlisted)
Design Team:
Principal: Sean Lally
(Marina Nicollier, Matt vander ploeg)
SHAGG picks up where Astroturf left off, creating an artificial carpet for the human body to engage in the exterior environment. Free from the constraints of the existing climatic context, SHAGG produces its own. The project doesn’t rely on the sun to produce warmth for reclining; color and bloom associated with vegetation is no longer tied to a particular season, and distracting sounds of traffic and neighbors is overcome by ‘white noise’ emitters embedded within its surface. Composed of a series of exterior thickened carpets that strategically emit materials of light, heat, and sound, the system allows for a level of artificial coziness, creating an environment that enables social gathering around the climatic and tactile qualities of the carpets. SHAGG doesn’t seek to simply recreate the recognizable, but designs its own micro-worlds.
Wire heating elements are embedded in aluminum-filled polyurethane liquid plastic to produce low thermal levels that can be felt against the body as it reclines on the exterior carpet.
Silicone rubber nubs permit light to move through the form, which still remains soft enough to recline upon
The individual segments of Shagg, tied to ergonomics and the spatial nodes created by the material energies, are not always coincident with one another, sometimes spilling out between the carpet sources or overlapping to produce intensified zones.
