Make your own Pasta Empire

Have you ever wanted to create your own empire? Don’t have any lands or millions of people at your fingertips? More pasta than sense? Then this is the activity for you. Start small with a house or two and before you know it, you’ll have a street, then a village and if time really is no issue, an empire!

Step 1

Lay out your 4 lasagne sheets so that one corner of each is touching, leaving an empty square in the middle. These are going to be the walls of your house. Now apply glue (or tape) to the inside of the walls to attach them together.

Step 2

Go nuts on the ornamentation. The more pasta types you have, the more exciting the design. The tips below will help you think like an architect when building your pasta creations!

Which pasta should I use?

The key elements to the build is making the pasta do all the hard work. So choose the pieces carefully to represent different parts of buildings. For example, macaroni will perform much better under compression that linguine, so will be a much better choice for structural elements of your building(s).

How do I make columns?

Because of its flat top and base (unlike penne which sits at an angle), you can thread lots of pieces of macaroni together to create a column. In this respect it works similarly to concrete by performing well in compression (forces acting from above running down the macaroni). If you tried to make a floor system using the same techniques (essentially rotating 90°) the pasta would sag and become ineffective for its purpose.

How do I make a tiled roof?

A time efficient way of tiling a roof for example is coating the lasagna sheet in PVA glue first, then placing the roof tiles on top rather than gluing each individual piece. For pasta types I recommend either macaroni for traditional tiles or capellini for thatched roofs.

I’ve finished the building…what next?

Once finished with the structure, you can think about creating a site. Capelli d’angelo strand pasta works great for trees and general foliage. There is also a large selection of non-traditional pasta shapes like flowers which can really help with sorting out scale in your project.

Optional step 3

Put your empire under siege with a makeshift catapult and blue-tack to test the structural capabilities of your designs.

As a former Accelerate Participant, Daniel Boran is now a 5th Year Student at The Bartlett School of Architecture with a passion for solving design problems, timber, and pasta. You can contact him on daniel.boran48@gmail.com or check out his work below:

https://danielboran.myportfolio.com/work

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