Scheduled to open October 2009, Asymptote Architecture’s YAS hotel in Abu Dhabi is currently nearing completion. Based in NYC, Asymptote are known for their work at the crossroads of Art and Architecture.
Yes, that’s a formula 1 racetrack you can see in front of the hotel in the image below.
The grid-shell encompassing the hotel complex consists of 5,800 pivoting diamond shaped glass panels. With the help of lighting integrated behind each panel, designed in conjunction with Arup Lighting in NYC, the project is said to ‘respond visually and tectonically to it’s environment.
I am yet to figure out for sure whether the individual panels of this facade actually move, but I do remember hearing about a year ago that this was the intention. Regardless of whether this ambitious plan made it through to the final design – the result is definitely spectacular. This hotel is, after all, in the desert.
Asymptote’s founders and partners Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture quote their inspiration for the architectural landmark as ‘aesthetics and forms associated with speed, movement and spectacle to the artistry and geometries forming the basis of ancient Islamic art and craft traditions.’
In 2004 Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture were awarded the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts in recognition of contributions to the progress and merging of Arts and Architecture. For this project, I’ll be keen to see what they do with the facade (content?) once it’s up and running.
“Lights On” audio visual performance driven by openFrameworks created for the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria
This is intended to be the starting point for a number of workshops using OpenFrameworks with an introductory session suitable for people with no “oF” experience but some basic understanding of scripting in Processing, Flash, etc.
Location: University College London, Gower Street Building: Wilkins Room: Old Refectory
If you are interested in participating in the workshop please contact us immediately as places are limited. The workshop is free, all you need is a laptop. You may want to bring along other interfaces, microcontrollers, cameras etc that you’d like to play with. Complete Details of Workshop and how to sign up
Interactive Architecture is evolving after 4 years of me writing some 388 articles on my own. I’ve invited Lighting Designer Ben Kreukniet from United Visual Artists & Interaction Designer Paul Skinner from Digit to contribute to the blog as guest writers.
Coop Himmelblau was founded in 1968 by architects Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky and Rainer Michael Holzer. In its early days, the firm was based in Vienna, but moved to Los Angeles in the 1980’s. Their early experimental works included a series of installations in which people played key roles. These experiments included inflatable spaces that could fit into a suitcase. These particular experiments were small enough that they were represented in full scale. However most of their earlier work was represented by large-scale models. Coop Himmelb(l)au paid attention to extreme detail, creating interior models, many times, at a scale of 1:10.
Their work was inherently performative, a couple of examples being “Soul Flipper”, a face helmet that is sensitized to react to movements of facial muscle and skin to transmit optical and acoustical signals and ‘Hard Space’, an event in which heart microphones were attached to the three group-members and electronicallv connected to three explosive charges two kilometers away. The transmission of the three heartbeats activated the explosions, and three “instant” (and very temporary) spaces were realized.
The name “Coop Himmelblau” is German for “Blue-Sky Cooperative” and reflects the firm’s design intent to make architecture that alludes to cloud-like and heavenly imagery through complex angular forms that create dynamic and airy spaces, as well as their extensive use of glass and steel in their projects.
Some of Coop Himmelblau’s recent projects which best exemplify this design intention are the BMW welt in Munich, the Cinema Center in Busan, South Korea, and particularly the Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio, completed in 2007.
When the groundbreaking Prada store by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas opened in New York’s SoHo neighborhood in 2001, the concept of retail design was forever changed. Now, less than a decade later, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect and the Italian fashion house have done it again with the Transformer, a shape-shifting event structure in Seoul, South Korea that will accommodate art, cinema, and style events for the brand.
The pavilion combines the four sides of a tetrahedron: hexagon, cross, rectangle, and circle into one structure. Covered with a smooth elastic membrane, the steel-framed building can be flipped and rotated using cranes, reconfiguring the structure into one of its four different façade and floor-plate configurations to complement the nature of a given event.
“The interesting thing about this building is the acknowledgement of the Transformer as a dynamic organism, opposed to simply a static object, which arbitrarily fits program,” says Koolhaas. “Prada Transformer helps add an extra dimension regarding the treatment of this typology by allowing it to be molded in real time, depending on the specific programs it intends to facilitate inside.
Located in Seoul’s 16th-century Kyeonghee Palace, the Transformer opened on April 25 with “Waist Down,” an inaugural exhibition featuring the skirt designs of the label’s doyenne, Miuccia Prada, that will run through May 24.
Another great project by LAb[au], “fLUX binary waves” is an urban and cybernetic installation based on the measuring of infrastructural ( passengers, cars…) and communicational ( electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones, radio…) flows and their transposition into luminous, sonic and kinetic rules.
This relation between the installation and the urban activity happens in real time and sets each person as an element of the installation, as a centre of the public realm. The installation fLUX, binary waves is constituted by a network of 32 rotating and luminous panels of 3 meter-high and 60 centimetres wide, placed every 3 meters to form a kinetic wall.
The panels rotate around their vertical axis, and have a black reflective surface on one side, the other being plain mat white. Their rotation is controlled by microprocessors, allowing to determine precisely the rotation speed and angle, while their networking allows to synchronise the movement of the 32 panels.
The microprocessors are connected to infrared sensors, capturing the surrounding infrastructural flows, defining the frequency and amplitude of the rotation. According to this set up, each impulse is transmitted from one panel to the other, describing visual waves running from one side of the installation to the other, and then bouncing back while progressively loosing oscillation. All these principles relate the ‘micro-events’ happening in the area to a unified play of light, colours and sounds directly derived from the rhythm of the city flows.
As such, the installation proposes an urban sign having as subject the ‘urban’ and as message to be a catalyst of urbanity via the transcription of urban flows in a contemporary play of kinetics, lights and sound.
Interactive Architecture covers emerging architectural and artistic practices where digital technologies & virtual spaces merge with tangible and physical spatial experiences. An active architecture, sensing, observing, feeling, listening, thinking, reacting, proposing, adapting, learning, even sometimes interacting. It is an architecture in constant flux best suited to prototyping and semi-perminant installations.
