Cloud City
Cloud City: Cardboard City Installation and Workshop
Cloud City is a cardboard art installation and co-creation workshop that invites children to imagine, build, and take part in the making of a shared urban environment. In many ways, it shares a similar spirit with the Cardboard City art installation and workshop we organised a few years ago in Kuching, with the Tainan version developed on a more intimate scale. The project was co-led by Tay Tze Yong from INTODESIGN Lab and Prof. Eric Chen from ArchiBlur Lab, and hosted by the National Tainan Living Arts Center (國立臺南生活美學館) in Tainan City, Taiwan.
The collaboration began when Prof. Eric Chen invited INTODESIGN Lab to take part in the installation and workshop in Tainan. The invitation grew from a shared interest in public art, participatory design, and architectural design as a medium for experimentation, imagination, and public engagement.
For INTODESIGN Lab, Cloud City continues an ongoing exploration of architecture beyond buildings. Over the years, the Lab has created several cardboard art installations, using this lightweight, accessible, and transformable material to test spatial ideas and engage the public. Cardboard is simple and familiar, yet it can inspire curiosity, especially among children, and be transformed into a spatial experience with much larger impact.
Following the invitation, Tay and the INTODESIGN Lab team worked closely with Prof. Eric Chen and his team through several rounds of online discussion, testing the project’s typology, framework, massing, and spatial configuration through sketches and 3D modelling. These explorations shaped Cloud City as an extendable spatial framework, open to transformation through the imagination and interaction of its participants. While the basic structure was prepared by the design team, its final character was shaped by the ideas and hands of the children who took part in the workshop.
The main structure is formed about 2 main axes; one representing form, mass, and presence while the other suggested relationship, movement, and exchange. Together, they reflect the dual nature of urban life: a city is made not only of buildings, streets, and physical structures, but also of movement, gathering, and invisible social connections. Visually, this is reflected in an open and lightweight frames and lines contrasting with solid, seemingly immoveable volumes.
Echoing the imaginative spirit of Asymptote’s Steel Cloud project, an unbuilt proposal for Los Angeles that explored a suspended urban structure above the freeway (https://asymptote.net/projects/steel-cloud/), Cloud City also invited multiple readings of the city as an elevated and open-ended landscape. The children could imagine the installation as a streetscape, a cluster of towers, a mountain range, a port, a transportation network, or even a city floating in the sky.
At the end of two days, the completed Cloud City is both playful and contemplative; its elevated form suggested a future-oriented vision, while responding to contemporary urban concerns such as limited land, environmental change, and climate uncertainty. In this sense, the project became not only an installation, but also a way of imagining how cities might become more adaptable, connected, and responsive to change.
Through play and collaboration, children acted as co-creators by integrating unique cardboard designs into a shared, evolving installation. This process transformed a simple crafting activity into a collaborative exercise in urban thinking, where individual contributions shaped a collective whole.
Though temporary, Cloud City leaves a lasting impression on its organisers and participants – about how design and the public can come together to imagine how cities could be built, shared, and continuously re-created.
The entire work was produced within a short period of two days, including the assembly of the main installation, with the support of ten university students from CYCU, Professor Chen’s team from ArchiBlur Lab, Wong Jun Xiang from INTODESIGN Lab and more than sixty participating children. Their collective effort transformed simple cardboard materials into a shared urban imagination.
Text by Tay Tze Yong
PROJECT GALLERRY
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Designer : INTODESIGN Lab
Year : 2026
Location : Tainan | Taiwan
Supporters : With students from the Department of Architecture, Chung Yuan Christian University (CYCU)
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