Helen Deng

    IT took Noa Haim and five helpers a whole night to install the Spaceship Heart, a paper installation artwork at the Yitian Holiday Plaza.

    And it took them several more hours of work on New Year’s Eve to make a heart-shaped work of art, said Haim, 36, an architect, teacher and writer from the Netherlands, on Friday, the first day of the exhibition.

    The end result would embody a self-planned programmatic organization for a new place people truly love, according to Haim.

    The installation is composed of about 250 units made of cardboard. Each unit consists of eight similar faces. Each face represents a program in a hypothetically mixed-use structure. They are carefully made and installed to make sure that units of the same color are in the same line. The units are interlocked so that the installation would not fall even though some units at the base are taken out.

    “It’s a tribute to Richard Buckminister Fuller,” said Haim, referring to the 20th century American architect who believed that humans were astronauts on Spaceship Earth and the Earth was like a large mechanical device that would survive only if people living on it knew how to operate it correctly.

    The project was initiated in a site specific installation made for London Festival of Architecture 2008, when the material was paper rather than cardboard.

    It’s one of just two satellite exhibitions curated by foreigners at the 2011 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture.

    Modular cardboard building blocks are provided to visitors so they can construct the Spaceship Heart and experience it growing in size.

    Duration: 10 a.m-10 p.m., until Jan.30

    Curator: Noa Haim/Collective Paper Aesthetics

    Venue: B2/F, Yitian Holiday Plaza, Nanshan District

    Metro: Window of the World Station (世界之窗站), Exit A