Pop-up Architectural Model Book

I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve actually been a little busy with freelance work that I can’t post about yet. Instead, I’ll tell you about a fun project I did a while ago. This may be the first thing I ever did which appeared in a book. The piece was a pop-up architectural model I made once for a performing arts building. The over-sized (19.5 x 14 x 5″) pop-up models were tipped onto the center spread of a hardcover book given out at a gala for the facility.

The job came in (as many do) already behind schedule and I only had a partial week to turn it from an idea into a finished die line ready for production. Smaller spreads in pop-up books can take months to design (although, admittedly, I was lucky to be creating a building and not something with a ton of organic shapes involved.) The company I was with was great for trusting me with something this big when I was so new at the job. I really learned a lot about designing rapidly for production while I was working there and I’ll always appreciate the opportunities and education I was given. I remember that this pop-up was meticulously reviewed for accuracy not only by the client but by the architects who designed the building as well. As a result, I was asked to make several rounds of really unusually detailed changes. I had to move all sorts of things around 1/16″ here and there to exactly match the blueprints of this specific building.

Parallels and perpendiculars are SO much easier to work with when your sculptures have to fold flat. In this case however, I was informed that the street levels around the building were slightly different and that I needed to represent them as such. I also wasn’t able to have the roof completely flat since there was a prominent inclination to much of it. I had to create a system of “slipping” panels which would automatically and reliably locate themselves into position once the book was opened. I’m proud of the fact that I was able to engineer some of the roof and street to be sloped at the correct angles and other parts remained parallel to the ground. Overall, I really enjoy this type of larger scale detail-oriented pop-up book work.