The Tower of Twelve Stories is an outdoor installation for the 2016 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

Can the posture of an abstracted body be studied as a structural problem through an oversized contrapposto figure? This is the challenge of Tower of Twelve Stories. What happens when you slouch, slump, stoop, hunch, loll, sag, and droop? The off-balance nature of these postures create a structural issue, where gravity places load unevenly. Constructed with a steel endoskeleton and cladded with lumber, we developed a quad-tripod system to let all columns be non-perpendicular.

During the day, the white-painted structure shades the festival audience from the hot climate, as it casts a long shadow and serves as a canopy from the intense heat. The shape of the shadow it projects is like a large stencil of light that sprays tiny humans into a shaped silhouette against the scorching sun. Or, a very large bounce board for photographers chasing music gods. At night, this installation comes alive as dynamic projections and embedded lighting illuminates the space around the structure.

Conceptually, this project is also a 1:1 section model of a fictional apartment building that has no typical plans, where every room is its own episode. The interior of a stack of cartoon bubbles are exposed against the architectural cut, as the characters find atypical lifestyles against the geometries.