Urban Coral

About This Project

The Urban Coral is a participatory artwork exploring form, design and interaction through crafts and technology. A playful installation made of straws, wire, paper, plastic, and hand-crafted electronics, the Urban Coral uses the tetrahedron as a starting point and grows through geometrical sprawl as an organism inside the ‘urban ocean’.

The Urban Coral is born out of our investigation into modular geometry and participatory design. Our inspiration derives from natural phenomena, biology, platonic solids and our canvas is the city! Through the use of low-cost materials, electronics and simple craft techniques, we invite the public to join us into constructing a scalable installation that propagates inside the urban milieu. The Urban Coral grows on any surface, a building facade, a window, a bench, a tree and creates a web that connects urban elements in an ephemeral, spontaneous way.

The Urban Coral was initially commissioned by the Urban Gorillas for their project ‘Life Inside Outside A Bubble’ held in Nicosia, Cyprus in 2015. For the project we worked with passers by and young people who made the installation with us though a drop-in two-day workshop.