Visual Studies · VS 2A

Pack and Unpack

Rong Cao · Instructor: Jacklin Bloom

Pack and Unpack investigates architectural form as a process of extraction, recomposition, and re-legibility. Starting from a found 3D chair asset, the project translates an everyday object across representational states: orthographic projection, planar extraction, and three-dimensional reassembly. By flattening components into discrete profiles and recomposing them into a compact mass, the object’s original function is suspended and re-scripted.

Studio: VS 2A
Instructor: Jacklin Bloom
Team: Rong Cao

Rather than treating packaging as a purely logistical operation, the project frames it as a spatial and conceptual strategy. Nesting, compression, and inversion are used to produce a hybrid object that oscillates between utility and excess, enclosure and exposure. Through this process, translation itself becomes the primary design method, testing how form, meaning, and legibility shift as objects move between scales, formats, and states of assembly.

Studio brief · VS 2A

This seminar introduces students to representational modes of translation that work across orthographic projection and 3D modeling. Taking as a starting source a downloadable asset of a 3D digital file of a chair, the project for the semester is to convert, or translate, its parts into its packaged form as a novel object that straddles the territory between utility and uselessness: an object that has legible traces of its function but is not functional per se. The logics of product packaging for storage and shipping offer a springboard into ways of reconstituting the figuration, resolution, and legibility of a given object. Design parameters such as fitness, undercutting, nesting, and compactness are employed as guides in creating low-res three-dimensional pieces from the two-dimensional profiles of the chair’s parts. The final objects are rendered and 3D printed for exhibition.