This holiday season, you can see Scotch tape used for a lot more than wrapping gifts. If you are in Paris, you can wander through these futuristic floating tunnels of Scotch tape at the Palais de Tokyo.
Called ‘Tape Paris’, this installation was designed by the Berlin collective Numen/For Use and makes use of nearly 44 kilometers of Scotch tape. Scotch tape was layered to create sinuous tunnels that were then covered both inside and out with a cling wrap-like plastic sheet in order to hold the forms together. It took 12 people 10 days to wrap the tape around the concrete pillars and wind it across 50 meters of space – at a height of six meters above the floor.
Walking through the installation not only provides an ethereal and futurist experience, but also demonstrates the incredible material properties of common household tape: some of the strongest types of household adhesives can carry up to 30 kilograms of force before breaking! In Paris, five visitors can climb into the installation at a time and wander through the translucent tunnels and channels.
Numer/For Use have explored the potential of tape as a design material for architecture in the past with ‘Tape’ projects in Melbourne and Tokyo to name a few. They’ve also explored the limits of net materials with inspiring projects such as the recent Net Linz.
If you can’t experience this installation first hand, take a look at this video.
Part of the ‘Inside’ exhibition curated by Jean de Loisy, Daria de Beauvais and Katell Jaffrès, ‘Tape Paris’ will be on display at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris until January 11, 2015.