Architectural Landscape

By Kelly Klaasmeyer

It was a landscape that might have come from a national park in Utah. Or a Road Runner cartoon.

The surreally undulating terrain of Rip Curl Canyon, the Rice Gallery’s first installation of the academic year, was made primarily of cardboard. But despite the flimsiness of the material, the work invited people to interact with it in a variety of ways. Visitors traversed its surface as the cardboard crunched under their feet like snow. They climbed its cliffs and slid down its gulleys. Some students even brought their books and lounged in the cardboard curves.

Rip Curl Canyon by Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues

The cardboard landscape was created by Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues of the collaborative team Ball–Nogues. The pair met while studying architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and both went on to work for the renowned architect Frank Gehry at Gehry Partners. Nogues spent 11 years at the firm in product design and production and became known as “the guy who could build anything.” Meanwhile, Ball, who worked with Gehry Partners as a student, used his technology and design skills to become a set and production designer, working on numerous films, including those in the Matrix series.

Cardboard constructions invariably call to mind Gehry’s cardboard furniture, and it was his work that sparked the duo’s infatuation with the material. According to Ball, they wanted to “take a process that was started by Frank Gehry and expand it to the scale of architecture.”

In their first epic cardboard endeavor, Ball–Nogues created an installation for a Gehry event in which they fabricated panels, displays, and lounges by sandwiching layers of cardboard. That project became the testing ground where they refined their approach to the material.

Rip Curl Canyon was reminiscent of a lot of forms in nature—sand dunes, snow drifts, waves, rolling hills, ravines—but according to Ball, “We are not interested in creating imagery. We are interested in the viewer bringing imagery to the piece.”

In discussing the interactive nature of the work, Ball explains that he and Nogues wanted to “make something that was not just for the eye and the mind; it was also for the body.”

Making artwork for the eye, mind, and body was a complicated endeavor. Ball–Nogues essentially had to create their own giant “assembly kit” for the installation. The installation was digitally modeled on the computer and then physically modeled in the studio. To understand the materials, Ball–Nogues created full-scale mock-ups, stacking strips of cardboard and then shifting them like reams of paper.

Eight tons of cardboard and three tons of wood went into the construction. Ball–Nogues turned to industrial processes to cut the installation’s components to their specifications. The cardboard for the installation’s terrain was die-cut in Dallas, the curved strips designed to pop out of larger sheets like paper doll dresses. Meanwhile, the wood for the installation’s armature was precisely cut by a computer-controlled router.

After seven months of planning and preproduction, the installation was constructed over a three-week period with Rice Gallery staff and student volunteers. In the end, it consisted of approximately 20,000 strips of die-cut cardboard held together in sections by thousands of drywall screws. The sections were fastened to a wooden framework that started high in the back of the gallery and sloped down to the window wall at the front. Visitors could even walk through the installation’s understructure and explore its framework or rest on benches built into the intimate, cave-like space.

Architecture students from the University of Houston as well as Rice were among the Rip Curl Canyon volunteers. “I think that a lot of the students were very excited to help manifest something that breaks from the mold of typical construction projects,” Ball says. “Many of them didn’t have a lot of construction experience, so seeing anything built was exciting to them—it’s architectural in nature and has an unconventional shape.”

Ball figures that the effort that went into the project was equivalent to the effort required to build a small house. But like all installations at the Rice Gallery, its allotted life span was a brief five weeks. Afterward, the wood was salvaged, and those eight tons of cardboard went through Rice University’s recycling center. “I wish there was a home for retired art installations,” Ball says wistfully.