Each day, Scottish artist Charles Young designs and builds a new castle, carousel, or church, using only cardboard. His masterwork of A4 architecture, Paperholm, looks like what you'd get if you recreated SimCity with scissors and glue.
Young's micro-metropolis is filled with cranes and oil derricks, homey bungalows and mansard roofs. It features faithful reconstructions of architectural archetypes, like flying buttresses and A-frame cabins, and surreal buildings supported by chicken feet.
Despite its fanciful feel, Young's pulpy municipality was inspired by a series of photos by Bernd and Hilla Becher called "Typologies" that rigorously document industrial sites from straightforward, objective angles.
Young isn't copying their photos; instead, he's trying to translate the structures that surround him into a miniature municipality. "The ideas come from things that I've seen or read about, the pieces that I make are never a copy of a real building but are sometimes tangentially inspired by something real," he says.
His favorites include number 19 in the series, which features a cabin with a viewing platform. Another is capped with a spinning sign cheekily announcing its place, number 117 in the series. His models cover hundreds of years of architectural styles, though Young says he is drawn to complex forms. "I really like doing the pieces with a lot of cut out detail, although they do take a long time."
His crafty city lacks a master plan, but he hopes to unify the various buildings into a unified vellum vista at some point. "I'm hoping to be able to show them at some point as a complete set," he says. "I'm starting to work on a drawing that incorporates all of the buildings as a complete city."
Though Young studied architecture in college, he says Paperholm is an art project, not an attempt at urban planning. As such, he's OK with the notion of sprawl. "I'm not sure of the endpoint of the project at the moment," he says. "I think that I'll see how I feel about it after a full year but it's really something that can roll on and on."
