A City of Staples

Stacks of staples can be aggravating to deal with since they tend to break at any hint of pressure. Artist Peter Root has exploited this tendency to create an entire new world, Ephemicropolis.

This miniature megalopolis is composed of myriad clusters of staples stacks of different heights, ranging from a full stack (4.5 inches tall) to a single staple. Built in a financial building on Guernsey, an island in the English Channel, the installation took over forty hours to complete. Root composed the installation with over 100,000 staples, breaking the various stacks to different lengths, and then placing them with steady hands. Of course, staples aren’t the only tool for creating miniature metropolises, as we’ve seen.

This post originally appeared on Architizer, an Atlantic partner site.