Five Nobel-winning scientists have been paired with five textile designers as part of a two-year project between Central Saint Martins College and the Medical Research Council, and the result is Nobel Textiles: a brilliant week of exhibitions and events at the ICA and in St James’s Park, London. Theres an introduction film to the project here
Five greenhouses in St James’s Park will contain self-folding fabrics, urban food production, garden furniture and more, with further work in the digital studio and bar.
Self Assembly
Philippa Brock has collaborated with Sir Aaron Klug (Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 1982), responding with a collection of Jacquard weaves that explore the methods of transforming 2-dimensional weaving approaches into 3-dimensional models.
Suicidal Textiles
Carole Collet has collaborated with John Sulston (Nobel Prize for Medicine, 2002 with Sydney Brenner and Robert Horwitz), creating a collection of garden furniture based on the principles of programmed degradation.
Now you see it, Now you don’t
Rachel Kelly has been working with Tim Hunt (Nobel Prize for Medicine, 2001), and has designed a collection of transparent wallpapers and paper lanterns responding to his discovery of cycling proteins which appear and disappear.
The Fat Map Collection
Shelley Fox has collaborated with Peter Mansfield (Nobel Prize for Medicine, 2003), and has created a fashion collection based on the MRI mapping of the body fat of 6 volunteers.
Metabolic Media
Rachel Wingfield has collaborated with John E. Walker (Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 1997), to create architectural scale textiles that explore urban food production, in response to John’s elucidation of the tiny motor that cycles energy in our cells.
The Poème électronique was a unique experience, originated from the request made by Philips to Le Corbusier for the design of the company’s pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. The whole project was initiated and directed by Le Corbusier, who also created and/or selected the images for the audiovisual show, with the organized sound composed by Edgar Varèse, and the stunning surfaces of the building designed by Iannis Xenakis. The result was a ground breaking immersive environment, since the space of the Pavilion hosted the audio and the visual materials as integral parts of the architectural design.
Unluckily, such a visionary synthesis of innovative ideas could not stand with its times, and the paradigm was never repeated, or even attempted, again: the Pavilion, notwithstanding the incredible number of spectators (2 millions), was turned down a few months after its inauguration, at the end of the Exposition. The disappearance of the Pavilion makes the Poème électronique a destroyed masterpiece.
What we stl have today are only fragments of the various components (i.e. photos and drafts of the architecture, the projected video in videotape from the Philips archives, a stereo reduction of Varèse’s and Xenakis’ musical pieces).
Virtual Electronic Poem (VEP) is a project realized as a virtual reality (VR) environment that reproduces the experience of the dismantled masterpiece through an accurate philological reconstruction of the original installation. The website looks a bit out of date but the first of two films in this post shows the results of the work. The second shows the Poème électronique as a film rather than in its architectural context. Perhaps someone out there would be good enough to bring the building into a public setting on Second Life?
Sean Hanna is an interesting architect/engineer whose work I’ve been meaning to cover for some time. He was awarded a American Institute of Architects Student Gold Medal and went on to work on algorithmic & parametric design aspects of major construction projects with architects including Foster and Partners and sculptor Antony Gormley. His research is mainly in developing computational methods for dealing with complex systems in architecture, and in structural optimisation and rapid prototyping technology. I’ve selected a couple of his projects to give a sample of his work but check out his website for more details. His work is part of the currently running “Capture & Context” exhibition I posted on early this week.
BODY / SPACE / FRAME
Sean role in the BODY / SPACE / FRAME by artist Antony Gormley was in the creation of methods for generating a body formally and constructing a geometry appropriate for and structurally constructing the 25 metre high sculpture. Built out of an open steel lattice in the shape of a crouching figure, it was sited on the end of an 800 metre polder and faced outward from the coast of the Zuiderzee, Holland.
PAN_07 CHAIR
Optimised cellular structure in collaboration with Timothy Schreiber
Based on an analogy with the highly efficient cellular structure of living wood or bone, which adapts to its environment as it grows, the chair’s interior is comprised of a fine lattice that minimises weight while maximising strength. The design method combines principles of evolution and artificial intelligence to create a material that responds to its environment by growing denser in the areas required to best withstand the external forces applied when the chair is in use.
The roof has historically focused on one primary function: keeping out the elements. New technologies, as present in Light-Emitting Roof Tiles, allow the integration of additional functions within roof surfaces. Manufactured by Lambert Kamps, the transparent roof tiles are integrated light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and designed to display text, pictures, and other graphical content in multiple colors. Information may also be animated, such as with an illuminated news trailer. Light-Emitting Roof Tiles also come with their own self-supporting solar-photovoltaic power system. via transmaterial
Here are some notes from the "New Technologies and New Materials" panel hosted by Peter Cornwell at last weeks Media Architecture Conference. As the opening panel it revealed the current technological developents in media-facade design and exposed the practical experiences of the speakers over a range of different approaches, programs and contexts. As the opening panel, it set the stage for discussing "the next step" and revealed the speed at which technological development is occuring.
Of course architectural design is in no small part, driven by the technologies available to it, and with the refinement of LED components originally used in LED advertising billboards we are seeing a growth in there use in the design of the built enviornment. At the same time the development of sustainable computing and network systems able to operate extensive façade data systems over long periods of time, has led to robust and economical systems that satisfy the requirements demanded by architects and building owners.
Ludger Hovestadt speaking
Architecture and Flusser’s Technical Images - Prof. Ludger Hovestadt
Ludger Hovestadt began the day with an entertaining talk which started with him describing how against the background of the information technologies, architecture has gained a new reality. A reality becoming ‘creamier and creamier’, a phrase that caught on, and was used by a number of later speakers. As a professor for architecture and CAAD at ETHZ where his interdisciplinary research involves architecture, computer science, mechanical engineering, robotics and cognitive psychology, he spoke about his current research which centres on the adaptation of technological developments made in other industries of expertise, into the building industry.
Example of Nano materials providing base materials for new technologies - The University of Toronto has developed a ’spray on’ solar collection material that is capable of capturing energy in the infra red spectrum Looking through the technological development of the "information society", he described how the granularity of objects is becoming smaller and smaller, until today matter can be investigated and described at sub-atomic scale. "The Big Zoom" as he called it, gives us an undertanding of the materials available to us which has led us to reconstructing objects from their most fundamental parts. We can build our environment from atomic scales upwards developing new smart, responsive and communicative material constructs. "No longer are objects or processes the constituting elements of a building. Now they are described as technical networks of communicating nodes, which balance themselves in contrived patterns."
"Printable" solar cells are coated with a common ingredient used in toothpaste and suntan lotion and are able to produce electricity from direct sunlight as well as low-light and indoor lighting. They are manufactured with a process similar to inject printing.
These ideas of creating new materials from elemental levels has a longer history in science, but with the aid of digital computation we are seeing a wide range of rapid protoyping and CAD-CAM systems giving architects the ability to construct bespoke materials in relation to specific needs at low costs, quickly. One example of this change in design and manufacture of our built environment highlighted by Ludger, are printable solar cells. With current solar technology becoming financially benefical, and with print on demand, Ludger suggested that perhaps one day we could print onto virtually any other material, mixing previously unlike material combinations, to generate sustainable power supplies in the most unlikely of scenarios.
With the ability to rapidly create our environment as and when we need it, he suggested that "We are going towards the end of devices and instead the construction of devices by print processes." Unfortunately Ludger, ran out of time, and by the looks of things he was only getting started so he didn’t quite get to a full conclusion, but none the less gave a positive look into the near future of architectural practice and the freedom it will provide for artists, architects and designers to generate their own technology and suprising applications from microscopic up to the architectural scales.
Rogier van der Heide - Arup Lighting - Hyperreality in the urban context
Rogier began by giving a historical example of what he considers a mediafacade by showing the stained glass windows of Notredame Cathedral in Paris.
He discussed the question "Who are we building these facades for?" and talked about the process of design and manufacture of one of his best known pieces of work, as the lead designer for Arups on the Galleria facde in Seoul. The windowless Galleria West mall used to be a drab, understated presence in the Apgujeong-dong district, one of Seoul’s most exclusive shopping areas. The client, Hanwha Stores Co, wanted to turn it into a landmark building that would reflect the exclusive boutiques within its walls.
UN Studio and Arup Lighting were brought on board to recreate the mall’s exterior, with additional support from Arup’s structural engineers. Together they developed a chameleon-like facade that reflects the subtleties of natural light on opalescent, dichroic glass discs during the day. At night the discs are individually backlit and controlled by a computer program to create colour schemes all over the building - each disc acting like a big pixel on a screen.
Rogier van der Heide went through various stages of modelling the facade, begining with very simply with cardboard, fibre optics, gels, and colour filters, followed by more sophisticated technologies and analysis, plus input from fellow design team members. 4330 discs, each 850mm in diameter, make up the entire facade of the mall.
Dr. Gernot Tscherteu, mediafacade.net - a team approach to develop standardised media facade components.
Gernot explained that mediafacade.net was a research group, comprising of design consultancies and major architectural and manufacturing companies as well as research institutions. "The group’s main innovations arise from its simultaneous reformulation of all of the architectural, structural and electronic components required for next-generation media facades so that display and built structure merge functionally, technically and aesthetically." He began by making some observations that often the relationship between the building and contemporary media facades is quite seperate and that the challenge is to build closer connections between the building and its facade, "between the form of the building and its skin". His criticisms of much screen technology in urban settings, was that it covered up buildings, rather than intergrating into a more unified architecture. Using examples of the media facades that cover Times Square in New York he argued that co-operation between architects, and engineers should begin with the design of the lighting components themselves rather than architects using lighting technology "off the shelf".
"While there are now many examples of ambitious projects, significant issues of resolution, brightness, maintenance expenditure and invasiveness of display systems with the building spaces located behind them, still remain. In this last respect, especially, difficulties arise because most media facades are planned after the architectural concepts – and often much of the construction itself – have been completed. In contrast, mediafacade.net considers display systems to be an integral part of architecture and the construction of such display systems to require long-life building components and materials in the same way as glazing and HVAC installations."
One part I found paricularily interesting was in all the challenges faced in such development work. Gernot disected the issues faced when designing these schemes into 4 main parts. Im afraid that I didnt quite have time to complete my notes so apologies to Gernot but heres what I got.
Content/Format - viewing distances - resolution - narrative/symbolic - day/night Display Tech - maintainance - cabling - energy - sun protection - structure Urban Plan - traffic - light polution - neighbours - cultural heritage Building - Users
After discussing some of these he ended his talk by presenting some current research on the development of aluminuium extrusions for combining structural strength and screen technologies into the buildings core framework. More information about their development of standardised media facade components can be found at www.mediafacade.net
Thomas Schwed - Mediafacades as integral part of architecture
The final speaker in the panel was Thomas Schwed who presented a series of projects he was involved in alongside examples of other artists, architects and designers operating at around the same which I thought was a very nice approach to looking at specific issues in his own work as well as more global issues in the design of mediafacdes. In particluar he spoke about his experiences developing a media skin for the T-Center (Vienna), an office building completed in 2004 and designed by architect Günther Domenig. In the end, due to urban planning restricting the facade to non-commercial imagery, the client of the architects eventually dropped the proposal due to financial issues.
Thomas’ discussion highlighted a re-occuring theme in how clients consider these technologies and the financial attraction of these kinds of systems weighed up against the aesthetic implications for content on such media facades. I personally liked the T-Center as it is, without a mediafacade but its often difficult to really assess looking at renders and animation how successful these kinds of proposal will be until the lights are turned on for real. Certainly there are examples where mediafacades have been benefical to architectural projects but in this case, we shall never know.
In a couple of weeks, I’m flying of to this years ACADIA Conference held in Nova Scotia, Canada where I will be presenting my recent installation Performative Ecologies as well as taking part in the Metabolic Network sensory workshop which looks like its going to be really interesting. The workshop will accommodate up to 25 participants who are interested in some of the following areas: concept of interactivity, modeling of dynamic systems, software craft, sensors and actuators, fabrication and textile arts. Details of the workshop can be found below and if that sounds of interest to you contact Acadia07workshops@dal.ca
SeaUnSea - Mette Ramsgard Thomsen In collaboration with dance choreographer Carol Brown
Metabolism, in living systems, has two aspects: anabolism (which means building up), and catabolism (or breaking down). These processes, part of all living systems, carry a particular resonance with respect to present-day concerns about sustainable environments. This two-day workshop, on the theme of “Metabolic Network”, brings together five researchers working in the area of electronic sensing in art and design, with a special focus on textiles and architectural-scale applications. The network will be a large installation made from a field of suspended fibers that have different properties: such as elasticity, conductivity, dissolvability, or luminosity. By joining the fibers together, a field of possibilities open up and patterns within the field emerge. The use of sensors and actuators, both electronic and mechanical, will provide dynamic and responsive features in the network. The result will be a metabolic network that emerges, acts and self-destructs over the course of the two-day period.
Loop.pH Sonumbra
The metabolic network will serve as a playground to explore the potentials of sensors and actuators hooked up to a responsive architecture. It will serve as the common medium for the work of the five invited researchers, each expert in some aspect of electronic sensing, textile design or architectural form-making.
Workshop leaders are:
Philip Beesley (architect and artist, associate professor and co-director, Integrated Centre for Visualization, Design and Manufacturing, University of Waterloo)
Mette Ramsgard Thomsen (architect and researcher, head of Centre for Interactive Technologies and Architecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen)
Rachel Wingfield and Mathias Gmachl (Wingfield is an electronic textile designer and lecturer at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, London; Gmachl is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher. Together, they form the design research studio Loop.ph, based in London)
T-Center (Vienna), an office building completed in 2004 and designed by architect Günther Domenig. In the end, due to urban planning restricting the facade to non-commercial imagery, the client of the architects eventually dropped the proposal due to financial issues. 
