The Brief
Stanlee Gatti needs little introduction in the world of high end event design. The firm is based in San Francisco, but their work is globally recognized. Their client list spans Chanel, Vogue, Armani and Jony Ive. You do not get that list by hiring anyone but the best.
I came in through a production company recommendation and went straight into direct communication with Gatti's team. We had one in person meeting at their offices in San Francisco. Stanlee had a clear vision and a real excitement about what we were going to bring to it. His team handed me a set of hand drawn botanical references, flowers that were being scaled up and printed as wall graphics for the space. Those were the 2D elements. Everything three dimensional was ours. After that meeting there were no further back and forths regarding the design. The next time I saw Stanlee was at the installation site.
Role
I was the creative director and project manager for our contribution to this large scale installation. We were responsible for the sculptural world that filled the tent.
As a follow up to our meeting, I built a series of small paper maquettes, one for each flower species. Those models served two purposes. They gave Stanlee something physical to react to and a clear picture of exactly what he was going to get.
Process
The material decision came fast. Coroplast is essentially the plastic version of cardboard, and I have spent years as a cardboard artist. I know exactly how it behaves, how it cuts, and how it anchors. For large format sculptural work under a tight timeline it was the obvious call.
UV paint is a fickle material. It is essentially all pigment in a clear base and it needs to be sprayed to be fully effective. Every shield also required a white base coat before any UV color went on top. We knew this going in and planned the whole painting system around it.
Once the paper models were approved, we deconstructed them and scaled each floral shield up individually to fit onto four by eight foot sheets of coroplast. We made cutting templates and traced and cut every piece by hand. Each flower was then organized by its sections and prepared for paint.
We transformed my shop into a black light paint booth. When you walked inside it was a dark purple universe with a giant glowing production line happening, and outside was the blaring sunlight of day. It was really striking. Two highly skilled artists were working the spray guns full time, building gradient washes and deep thoughtful color patterns across each floral shield. I built my own separate booth inside the shop to avoid overspray hitting the finished pieces, and worked through every shield individually from there, pulling lines by hand with sign painter brushes and small cutting brushes. The whole painting phase ran about a week. Three of us in there full time. Music blasting over the spray guns. It had a real Willy Wonka energy. We temporarily cleaned out the entire West Coast supply of black light paint.
Construction happened in the second room. Each completed flower started with a central cone, scored and folded from coroplast and bonded together with high bond tape. We then cut center holes into each floral shield and placed them at different depths on the cone. That is what created the 3D effect. Coroplast anchoring hardware, similar to a rivet, connected spacing tabs between each shield to hold them out at 90 degrees. It was time honored and laborious work. But it was not complicated. The system was solid.
We made over 60 flowers ranging from 3 to 6 feet in diameter, dozens of coroplast leaves to accompany the bursts and bouquets, and hundreds of feet of waterline PVC pipe repurposed as vine. That pipe comes on a spool, less rigid than traditional plumbing pipe, and it behaves exactly like a real vine when you run it up a pillar. That was an intentional design decision. All of the flowers, leaves, and vines were constructed and painted with the same UV process and in the same two and a half week build window.
Installation
We built a loft system inside a box truck and loaded all of the flowers onto giant shelves, starting from the top and working our way down. Then we drove from my fabrication shop in Nevada City to a private estate in Marin County. The tent was 40 by 100 feet with 20 foot walls, a pitched ceiling, and support pillars throughout. The whole room was already blacked out when we arrived. The other production company was on site installing the 2D wall elements and we got to work.
We rigged drop points with a scissor lift and hung each flower one at a time using aviation cable and adjustable ratchet systems, which allowed us to fine tune the depth of every piece. My co-collaborator and I eyeballed the placement and composition of each flower as it went up. We started with the large flowers first, then placed the smaller ones around them, filled in with leaves, and used the buds to close any remaining negative space. Once all the clusters were placed we ran the vines horizontally overhead from bouquet to bouquet, then spiraled them down the pillars to the floor. I brought my own high powered black light on site for quality control throughout.
Outcome
This installation was built for a single night and designed to make memories that would last a lifetime. The result of our work was so well received the client chose to acquire the entire installation for their private collection. It was our honor to rise to the occasion and create a caliber of work that moved both Stanlee Gatti and his esteemed client so deeply. We are wizards in our field and this was exactly the kind of magic we came to make.
What this project demonstrates
I was handed a minimal brief and a tight timeline. With that, I took this project from creative concept to delivery. The ability to take a little information and build something fully realized is at the core of how I work.
This is the world I comfortably live in; UV paint, vibrant color, and large scale fabrication. The production company brought me in because they knew my capabilities and trusted that I would deliver something extraordinary.
The paper models were both presentation pieces and the fabrication system. The design came from someone who already understood the material. There was no translation lost between the idea and the object.
What makes my practice work is the depth of fabrication knowledge behind it. For two decades I have been building large scale work by hand. I can design something and already know how it is going to be constructed.
For one night a group of people walked into a universe of alien flora and lost all sense of proportion. The flowers that towered overhead and the colors that washed over everything turned the whole world into something that could not possibly exist. We built something so visually consuming and so narratively rich that the celebration inside of it would live forever in the memories of the people who were there.