Magic Carpets is a temporary intervention realized in the occasion of Nuit Blanche Taipei 2017. The projects deals with our understanding of drawn public space and its implications on people’s behaviors. Therefore, we decided to produce a series of urban drawings, meant as public colorful carpets to be placed in different areas of the Gongguan Campus of the National Taiwan University. The geometries reveal an interplay around the idea of tile, addressing issues of scale and modularity: each carpet, even though is clearly imagined as a compound of repeating and differentiated pieces - graphic tiles indeed - has a consistent aesthetics as a whole, framing a vocabulary of independent bigger urban elements.
The success of the public event perfectly highlighted the linguistic nature of this “Magic Carpets”, conceptually and practically adaptable for many different spatial conditions. The design is based on a precise geometrical organization, inspired by traditional Chinese iconography, then flattened into public drawn plans - to track and trigger people’s intuitive re-actions.
The aim of the intervention was to engage the visitors in two different moments: during the realization, rising their curiosity towards the construction process and techniques, and, of course, during the carrying out of the event itself, inviting them to literally use the carpets as new public surfaces where to gather, talk, play, or simply seat and rest. Many performances spontaneously took place interacting with the intervention, helping to establish an active dialogue between the visitors and the lines on the ground. Due to the adverse climate conditions, the positioning of the intervention was modified from the National Taiwan University to the square in front of the Taiwan Power Company Building.
