This post is not even about toys, it is about an artist and his work. Matias Bechtold's works are something that I consider inspiring for everyone that deals with toys for two reasons: the scale and the material. It is something like a paper engineering supported by an Italo Calvino narrative.
Made by corrugated cardboard their cities evoke scales relations in a view of giant on the urban tissue. Usually without people, his scenarios evoke large cities with skyscrapers and strong scale differences. The use of this kind of cardboard creates a strange monochromatic atmosphere that sometimes remember some "after war" stage or some kind of desert city.
One of the interesting aspect is the use of corrugated cardboard material characteristics in order to achieve pattern effects and scale definition through the design of windows and levels separations in the buildings. Also the streets and the railways are made using the material texture.
More recently Matias Bechtold worked on the “Im Inneren der Apparate” (On the inside of machinery) project that explore some kind of "inner" architectural point of view building cities with their own detailed interiors.This work is also using recycled material as plastic boxes, televisions or vacuum cleaner in order to create interior complex spaces with a really futuristic and technical look.
Indeed exist, in the Bechtold's works, some kind of exploration around the basic architectural composition elements that exist in the best architectural toys. In fact one of the most important aspct in the toy design is precisely the complexity reduction in order to keep the nature of the object without the "too much information" effect.
