el laberinto

Herodotus, The Histories,  440 BCE

SO-IL, Detail of the Kukje Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, 2010 (via fastcompany)

"The entire new gallery will be wrapped in a stainless steel chain-link mesh, similar to the New Museum in New York, which Idenburg had worked on as a staffer for the Tokyo-based firm SANAA. Unlike the New Museum, the mesh around Kukje Gallery will be flexible. Think chain mail worn by medieval knights: The building's surface will undulate in the wind and change in the light. Where do you get oversized chain mail for a 2,000-square-foot building? The search set Idenburg and Liu on a globe-scouring search which started, once again, at Alibaba. “We took an intentionally naïve approach,” says Liu, of the decision to float their product specs to Alibaba’s global network of manufacturers. After putting out the call, they got back about 100 responses. Liu recollects, “About 90 said ‘not possible.’ But 10—maybe equally naïve companies—said they could do it.” Two of these companies sent SO-IL viable samples. Idenburg and Liu wanted to meet the top contender in Anping, a city in northern China not far from Beijing. Upon arrival at the company’s "headquarters," they found a dirt courtyard, some free-range chickens, and a one-man production team sitting outside welding each individual chain link by hand. To generate the roughly 600,000 links they needed on time, they needed the machinery of mass production. After some hunting, the couple found a local manufacturer--helped by the fact that Anping is apparently the global center of chain link production. A chain-link covered model of the Kukje Gallery in SO-IL’s office gives an idea of the building’s final form: a cloud with endless silver linings."