Architects Make Jelly Moulds Too : TreeHugger

jelly mould architecture at London Festival photo It was the competition to end all competitions; take some jello, add some architecture, with a dash of fun and here's what you get. Over 100 top architects worldwide submitted proposals for this jelly mould competition that ends up with the top ten entrants being cast in....jello. Part of the London Festival of Architecture, it's all for a good cause--Article 25,a disaster relief and design charity--and it challenged the architectural soul and notion of structure and technology. Said one (Will Alsop) : "I loved doing this, I had to mentally project myself into jelly to find the necessary inspiration. But once I had made the leap, I realised that there is a genuine relationship between jelly and architecture. It's to do with the spaces between buildings; the jellified urban fog of a city. It's about creating without destroying what's already there."

The winner was Tonkin Liu: Fresh Flower Jelly. They had created The Fresh Flower, a moveable pavilion for the Architecture Festival and this was reminiscent of the building. Since this is architecture, there is a certain intellectual slant to the explanation of the jelly experience: (Ivan Harbour) "Architects create space. But it is a specific sort of space: it is a space that you experience from within. This means that designing in jelly is a fascinating experience for us in doing the exact opposite to what we usually do."

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More intellectual interpretations: (Stephen Gage) "'As babies, we first learn about our world by touching it and putting bits of it in our mouth. Part of our subconscious appreciation of shape may well be a dim memory of how it might feel in our mouth. Thus, a dome is round and coolly satisfying, while a pointed building is like a sharp and dangerous knife. Jelly architecture returns architecture to the mouth, where we can once again taste it."