Made from sterling silver, this jewelry piece consists of a ring and seven stars, connected by silver chains. The stars get more delicate as they fall down the hand and end in a wristchain.

The task of the course ‘objects as architecture’ was to design a piece of jewelry inspired by one specific architect or building. One inspiration was Friedensreich Hundertwassers theory of the five skins. For him, the human experience revolves around (or within) five skins: the epidermis, which is the human skin, clothes, the house or building one is in, the social environment, which includes one’s identity, family, social circle etc and finally the planetary skin, “directly concerned with the fate of the biosphere, the quality of the air we breathe, and the state of the earth’s crust that shelters and feeds us.”

The second reference I chose was the Toshiba-IHI pavillion designed by japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa for the Expo ’70 world fair in Osaka. Housing a theatre, the building consists of a red sphere, surrounded by a steel structure of black tetrahedrons, that cling to the sphere and seem to grow atop it. While at the base the metal parts are sturdy and look almost like triangles, the parts at the top grow lighter and look almost like stars. Kurokawa was part of the metabolism movement, which saw the human condition as always-changing and thought, architecture should represent that. Inspired by the human body, the Metabolists sought to design buildings that could adapt and change with the society and humans around it. This is where Hundertwassers Five Skins and Metabolism come together: space and the human body being extensions of one another.