Mobile Chaplet is one of six portable spaces for reflection commissioned to travel to rural communities around the state of North Dakota as part of the Roberts Street Chaplet Project.
The conceptual starting points for Mobile Chaplet were the covered wagons that transported settlers to the Midwest, as well as the vaulted forms of traditional church naves. The design itself is the result of countless study models which explored the range of forms that could be created by weaving a series of rods of identical length (the form comes from variations in the distance spanned by each rod). The final pattern consists of two vaulted forms, one nested inside the other. Weaving was chosen as a method of construction in part because it allowed for a space that is simultaneously intimate and open to the surrounding prairie landscape. It was also chosen because the rods themselves reflected the linear nature of the paintings of the artist who commissioned the Chaplet (and painted a mural on its floor).
Constructed on a trailer bed, the vaulted canopy is composed of over 200 thirty-foot long thermoplastic composite rods. A bench floats above the trailer bed supported by the rods which also act as a backrest for the bench.
+ Project credits / data
Project: Mobile Chaplet
Location: Fargo, North Dakota
Architect: Moorhead & Moorhead with Richard Moorhead
Artist (floor mural): Marjorie Schlossman
+ All text and images courtesy Moorhead & Moorhead
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Esther + Lester » Blog Archive » green acres
5 days ago
[...] Mobile Chaplet, designed by Moorhead and Moorhead via Mood. [...]