Table of Contents

[Image: From Table of Contents by LOOMstudio; photo by Don Vu].

LOOMstudio—whose work has been on BLDGBLOG before (and I'm also a fan of their Sheep Barn project)—produced what they called the Table of Contents for a group show at Minneapolis's Form+Content Gallery last summer.

The Table of Contents is a machine to decipher the housing crisis; a hybrid of game board, dining table, and scale model. It records evocative and uncanny housing "values" within a neighborhood in North Minneapolis through interactive discovery and play.

That description isn't the most helpful text in the world, but you can see from the images re-posted here that the result is landscape, machine, stage-set, and exploded box by Joseph Cornell all in one.

[Image: From Table of Contents by LOOMstudio; photo by Don Vu].

Grass lawns with sawed-off tree trunks sit beside card games that have yet to begin, while copper pipes hold inexplicable rubber gloves full of marbles and a tea kettle (or is it a bedpan?) hangs nearby. Newspaper clippings like stars drift overhead in slowly moving constellations. Tiny ecosystems grow inside overturned Mason jars and the door of a safe sits sprung wide open, as if robbed.

[Images: From Table of Contents by LOOMstudio; top two photos by Don Vu].

The project is not available on the architects' own website, but you can check out the Flickr set here.