The White Elephant is a building inside a building. It’s a 10’x10’x10’ object which can assume different positions and orientations in space, while maintaining its basic purpose. “Somewhere between a super-furniture and a small house”, as the creators state, it is robust and sheltering, but also soft and inviting. Through use of digital fabrication, the piece is assembled, with its core accessible to visitors. It is a small scale experiment that engages with general issues of spacial versatility- the ability of built space to transform, conforming to its users as well as surroundings. The object is exhibited at Land of Tomorrow (LOT) Gallery in Louisville and designed by Jimenez Lai, Thomas Kelley, Cyrus Penarroyo, Andrew Akins, with Jimenez Lai as design leader.

“Its exterior is clad with translucent polycarbonate, and the interior is stuffed cowhide. It tumbles and changes orientation and can flip to eight different stances. What is a building that can tumble freely without gravity or fixed orientations, hard on the outside but soft on the inside, and obstructs the continuity of interior spaces like an elephant in a room? This installation is a freestanding micro building / macro furniture that questions projection, inside/outside, rigidity/fluidity and size /scale.”

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