It’s a kaleidoscope grown so huge you can walk inside. Installed most recently at the Blue Sky Center in California, this is the third iteration of peepSHOW by David Baker Architects’ DBA_Lab. “We created an object of intrigue,” explained Taylor Dearinger, associate at DBA.
DBA_Lab is an internal studio that works beyond customary boundaries of hospitality and multifamily housing. Its inaugural peepSHOW was realized for the first Market Street Prototyping Festival in 2015. Studio members used a CNC router to cut a kit of parts from acrylic mirror and plywood, all slotted together without fasteners.
A beefed-up second version consisting of 120 mirror-polished stainless-steel boxes, cushioned with marine-grade plywood, was screwed together. Surprisingly, it only showed for a few days at the same festival a year later, so as to avoid an intrusive gate or encircling fence. The security measure just “didn’t feel true to the nature of the piece,” Dearinger explained.
Fortunately, crowds were not a problem at the rural Blue Sky Center southwest of Bakersfield, California, where the piece was assembled a third time last year with fabrication partner BOK Modern and structural consultant Arup. Unfortunately, summer winds were unexpectedly strong and some boxes buckled. When the structure started to lean, this peepSHOW was disassembled and is now in storage. The memory lingers for Dearinger today like a mirage. Of course, she’d “love to see another version.”
View the full article: A Mirrored Mirage, which appeared in the AN Interior on its Spring/Summer 2024 Issue.