Cyclorama is a suspended twenty-foot high ellipse with a taught, white mesh surface over which dance dazzling crystalline patterns in a spectacular array of mesmerizing patterns. The ellipse is comprised of a series of layers starting with a white scrim stretched over an aluminum frame. It encircles an internal cylinder embedded with three different types of STRASS ® Crystals arranged in vertical lines. The cylinder houses a core of four tracts, with ten lights each, for a total of 40 lights. As the cylinder rotates on a motorized, chain-driven system, the light source serves as a stationary projector, refracting light through the crystals onto the screen to amplify a rich tapestry of patterns.
Exhibitions
Multi-Media Installations
From the spoon to the city- GPA’s legacy in scale-defying design innovation translates directly to earlier works produced in the exhibition and installation typologies. Imaginative and fantastical in many ways, despite aesthetic variety, projects produced aim to reveal and reform practices and social exchanges between people and places.
Crystal Clear Exhibit
Cyclorama
Cyclorama was conceived for the Crystal Clear Exhibit at the 2009 Interior Design Show in Toronto, Canada. Giannone Petricone Associates was one of six design firms invited to create an installation showcasing Swarovski ® Crystals. The exhibition was located in the show’s centre aisle and was organized by Azure Magazine and jointly sponsored by CRYSTALLIZED ™ – Swarovski Elements, Audi and Azure. Dancing light on an embroidered, rotating surface realizes a nuanced conversation between the real and the projected.
Toronto International Film Festival
Mongrel House
For Italy’s industry debut at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, Giannone Petricone Associates created a dream space that temporarily occupied the west garden at Mongrel House. SOGNI D’ORO was designed to provoke the imagination to consider endless possibilities over meetings, espresso, and aperitivo under the patterned sunlight that makes its way through dense stalactites of white netting.
The 30’ x 45’ tent was transformed by the layered swagger of 6,100 square feet of white snow camo netting rigged with nylon and pinned with plastic zip-ties. Sheltering a space that invited users for a slow escape from the pace of the festival, the juxtaposition of time and rhythm framed the basis of the installation. By day, the installation was a shaded meeting space for Italian Trade Commission industry partners marked by large-scale gold letters that encompass the bar and lounge seating and spell out “SOGNI” — the Italian word for dreams. By night, illuminated by a constellation of dramatic LED lights, the installation transformed into Mongrel Media’s legendary party space.
Interior Design Show
Treehouse
Commissioned as a featured space for the 2002 Interior Design Show, Toronto, re:treethouse was designed as a post‑9/11 architecture of ‘retreat.’ A retreat from everyday life, the model suite presented a place for refuge and enjoyment, and an escape from the duties of adulthood. Returning to a place of nostalgia, the Treehouse was both a retreat in convention and in function.
Interior Design Show
Welcome Mat
In the spirit of a conversation pit, Welcome Mat is designed to provoke multiple scenarios of social encounter. Created for Bisazza, Milano, it is articulated in complex textile patterns rendered in luscious glass micro mosaic for which Bisazza is known. The social “barge” is positioned to harness visitors at the entrance of the Interior Design Show — at the crux of its Baroque, trident plan — where the installation rolls the proverbial ceremonial red carpet. The bands of glass fabric scrunch and wrinkle to form various types of seating, leaning, and standing elements against which intimate and collective social scenes unfold.
