Taubman College Wilcox and Trandafirescu win 2013 AIA Huron Valley Honor Award for ‘Flying Carpet’
Assistant Professor Glenn Wilcox and Assistant Professor Anca Trandafirescu, principals of the firm area.architecture won a 2013 AIA Huron Valley Honor Award for their project “Flying Carpet,” in the Small Project/Low Budget category.
The Flying Carpet is a piece of microarchitecture that converts a long, narrow volume of space in an elementary school into a reading, writing, lounging, and play space for the children occupants of the building.
Folk stories in many cultures tell of a mythical flying carpet that transport their riders to distant places faster than the wind. Recalling these stories from our own childhood, the flying carpet became the apt poetic metaphor for the space’s primary activities: reading, writing, and imagining… the fastest ways we know to travel elsewhere.
The form of the work was generated using a computer script written by the designers, which facilitated the production of many variations early in the design process in addition to generating the final tooling paths for CNC machining.
Visit area.architecture.com for more information and images.
Project: Flying Carpet Location: Angel Elementary School, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Completed: August 2013 Designers: area.architecture, Glenn Wilcox and Anca Trandafirescu (principals) Fabrication: area.architecture Fabrication Team: Glenn Wilcox, Troy Hillman, Megha Chandrasekhar, Anca Trandafirescu Budget: $9800.00 (US)
