A Store for Elsa Peretti: Fluidity within Solidity

Various Locations, Spring 2014 Instructor: Caterina Tiazzoldi Elsa Peretti is a jewelry designer at Tiffany & Co., her designs are organic, sculptural, unaudulterated, pure, and sensual. Elsa Peretti takes jewelry as her own intimate experience. She is often inspired by the materials itself, such as melting or dripping lacquer, carving and molding a material by hand, and knotting or kintting. Thus, her designs are very ergometric, tactile and intuitive. For the first half of the semester, I was asked to choose a site and design a pop-up store. I am inspired by Elsa Peretti’s materials-based forms, as her designs reveal the nature of materials used, I took a similar approach and created giant shaders by weaving, to be placed into the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Simply rotating the simple-looking circular structure, a surreal landscape is shaped. In the second-half of the semester, I focused on designing a 100 square/meter retail space in a mall. By changing the relationship of the weaving and the ring structures, a series of display units is derived from the shaders. The hanging structures and the display units react differently to gravity. Instead of weaving everything together like the shaders, a stacking system is created as to provide stability for the products displayed. Every display unit is designed to tilt to one side, by rotating them just like the shader, a landscape that encourages customers to move around is formed. Hence, I named my project, ‘Fluidity within Solidity’.