The judges decided to give a special award to this giant table in the shape of a projection of the world, calling it: 'An extraordinary academic translation of an idea into a functional product. It is pleasantly bonkers, deliriously mad, and completely refreshing.' Initially designed for a pop-up restaurant project for the London 2012 Olympics, the table, and its integral benches, seat 80. Worldscape uses the Equidistant Cylindrical map of the world - NASA's digital map of choice, where all degrees are equal lengths in both directions - to create an inhabitable dining environment made from standard sheets of industrially-produced material, mapping Latvian birch plywood to the planet. The 360-degree length of the map was divided into 12, each strip measuring 30 terrestrial degrees in width, mapping perfectly onto 4ft wide sheets of plywood, melamine-faced for hygiene. The sheets were digitally carved with contours - outlines of the world's geography at 500m-high intervals, cut straight from the computer. The table is thus divided into a grid of 35 generally-square modules of irregularly-shaped landmasses, each deeply individual yet linking together to form a collective occupiable landscape.
展开▼
