Incision Skin

[Image: A rendering of the Polish Pavilion, designed for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai].

Architects Wojciech Kakowski, Natalia Paszkowska, and Marcin Mostafa will be designing the Polish Pavilion for Shanghai's World Expo in 2010.
The building's design, the architects write in a mass-circulated press release, was required to "denote, by its esthetic distinctiveness, the country of origin," and it had to "constitute, by the strength of its stylistic connotations, an evocative, recognizable and memorable cultural ideogram."
In this case, the "cultural ideogram" their winning design was meant to embody is "the motif of folk-art paper cut-out[s]."

[Images: Two more views of the Polish Pavilion, designed for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai].

As the below diagram makes clear, this "paper cut-out" theme has been taken quite literally: the outer envelope of the building is actually a kind of incised wrapper, capable of unfolding to form a flat surface again (albeit one in which the patterns do not always match up).

[Image: A structural diagram of the building's exterior, unfolded].

So is this mere ornament, nostalgia, and postmodern reference? Or is today's growing inclination for decorative hyper-complexity in architecture put to interesting and novel use?
On an unrelated note, I feel like this is the type of structure we'll someday learn has been entirely 3D printed. It also makes me think of the gorgeously baroque plasma-cut sculptural work of artist Cal Lane, as recounted last week on materialicious.
Read more at the project's website.