AIA Coastal Virginia Pop-Up City
Pop-Up City debuted this past Saturday in Virginia Beach, transforming Town Center’s Fountain Plaza through cardboard building and hands-on activities. Hosted by AIA Coastal Virginia in partnership with the Central Business District Association, the event featured large-scale cardboard installations designed and produced by six local architecture firms.
As the fourth installment of AIA Coastal Virginia's annual Pop-Up Park series, the one-day event also included interactive STEAM activity stations and a Children's Build Zone that filled the plaza with colorfully painted cardboard boxes donated by the AIA Coastal Virginia community. Energized by the music of a live DJ, visitors engaged in an immersive experience that inspired creative play and problem-solving in the next generation of designers.
The event welcomed 600 attendees, making it AIA Coastal Virginia’s largest to date. Throughout the day, visitors voted in the People’s Choice Award competition, explored installations by six architecture firms, and participated in activities hosted by 11 STEAM partners. More than 40 volunteers supported the event.
Each participating architecture firm received fifty 4-by-8-foot sheets of cardboard as the starting material for its installation. Working within guidelines for interaction, child safety, wind resistance, and recyclability, teams spent two months designing and prefabricating components before transporting them to the plaza for assembly.
The resulting installations demonstrated how one material and a shared set of constraints could produce six distinct experiences.
Hanbury’s installation, the Starburst Pavilion, features ten pentagonal apertures arranged around a central dodecahedron. Based on the geometry of a Platonic solid, each component and angle was identical, reducing fabrication complexity while producing a form reminiscent of coastal breakwater structures or a giant Willy Wonka Everlasting Gobstopper. The ten cones could also nest together for more efficient transport.
Once assembled, the apertures captured changing light and framed views of the sky, inviting visitors to step inside, sit, or lie back and look up.
