Here a book I’ve really been meaning to post about for a long time. Published by PA Press, Michael Fox and Miles Kemp have put together as they call it “a processes-oriented guide to creating dynamic spaces and objects capable of performing a range of pragmatic and humanistic functions. These complex physical interactions are made possible by the creative fusion of embedded computation (intelligence) with a physical, tangible counterpart (kinetics). A uniquely twenty-first century toolbox and skill set-virtual and physical modeling, sensor technology, CNC fabrication, prototyping, and robotics-necessitates collaboration across many diverse scientific and art-based communities. “
It contains a huge number of artists, architects and designers all working in and around this field that I have found so fascinating over the past couple of years. Its more than just a coffee table book, I think they’ve done an excellent job finding themes that run through the discipline and taken on some of the key challenges including asking “Interaction” can be understood to be in a spatial context. Its definitely worth picking up and will appeal to architects, artists and designers alike.
Rachel Armstrong teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where she is advocating a new approach to architecture – one that sees buildings becoming living things. One of the best things about working at the Bartlett are some of the extraordinary people that you spend time with day to day and while I often get lost in the science when Rachel explains her goals for a Living Architecture, I adore the passion and vision of a truly interactive architecture capable of continual conversation with it built and natural environment.
Key to Armstrong’s work are protocells – little cells of fat that can be sprayed on a building, creating a sort of frosting. These are designed to trap carbon dioxide and solidify it, turning it into solid pearls of calcium carbonate or biolime or mock rock. This coating will protect the building and even mend cracks. These protocells could even be used to stop Venice sinking, says Armstrong. Her plan is that the cells would be programmed to solidify when they get to the bottom of the lagoon, shoring up the foundations of the buildings above and thereby supporting the sinking structures. Find out more at TED and Rachel’s own website.
Created by architect Giselbrecht + Partner ZT GmbH this amazing project is called “Dynamic Facade” better known as the Kiefer Technic Showroom in Bad Gleichenberg, Austria.
One for those lucky enough to enjoy the Australian summer whilst we’re freezing up here in London- Olafur Eliasson’s Take Your Time exhibition is now on at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Not that we Londoners have anything to complain about really, as we got his Weather Project back in 2003, and judging by the number of people that chose to lie on the floor underneath it, we liked it. It looks like i’ll be in Sydney myself for a couple of days in March, and Take Your Time @ MCA is number 1 on my list of things to check out whilst i’m there.
One-way colour tunnel, 2007
Take Your Time is the first large-scale exhibition of works by this Danish-Icelandic artist to be presented in Australia. Raised partly in Iceland, Eliasson’s practice is informed by that country’s landscape and spectacular weather. He draws upon elements such as light, water, ice, fog, arctic moss and lava rock to create works that shift viewer perception and sense of place. From light-filled environments to walk-in kaleidoscopes, Eliasson’s unique, experiential works explore the intersection between nature and science, and the boundary between the organic and the artificial.
Notion Motion, 2005
Take Your Time opened earlier this month and will go through until April 11, 2010. It’s almost impossible to capture the beauty of the works in photographs, which leaves one choice – go and check it out. Stay tuned for more words from me once i’ve made it over there myself!
Sound is an integral part of the way we understand the space surrounding us. Size, quality, timbre, texture and the atmosphere of a space can all be inferred by the way in which we experience sound. Based on ideas from the Suffolk island of Orford Ness, Ric Lipson’s acoustic theatre ‘Hear Here” has been developed over a preoccupation with the acoustic qualities of circular spaces and ambient sonic landscapes. His work features in ‘Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands‘.
Ric Lipson‘s Hear Here concerns itself with sound and the body aiming to generate a physical construct that, while taking physics, music and architecture into account, sets out to explore how space can be understood through sound. If architecture is the manipulation of space, then the built form is a way of capturing the ambient. At the core of this question is the way space is experienced as a function of the sounds found both within and around the space, and the sounds that result from occupancy of the space.
The building is the final movement in the score of this experiential journey concerning itself with sound and the body. By giving concepts physical form, the experience can be explored. It is a tourable, demountable structure. By exploring concepts of resonance, reflection, absorption, forced and natural, the work creates a ‘sonic geography’ framed within a physical construct that invites you to explore, listen, improvise and experience.
Comprising a monocoque, aluminium, open cone wrapped within a closed, tensioned, plywood structure, the two spaces act in combination to echo the form of the ear. The outer ear is the space in-between the wooden and aluminium skin, and it has a soft acoustic. Sounds reflect around the walls in a whispering gallery-type nature. The audience follow the sounds around the dark outer corridor and are ‘cleansed’ of what John Cage would describe as the “chaos of the everyday sounds”. The journey around the structure leads the audience into the inner drum. The aluminium cone is open to the world. It is bright and metallic, both in form and acoustic.
This ‘Acoustic Theatre’ combines the world of manufacture, with the ephemeral nature of the ambient. The structure becomes a frame for the sound to exist. The audience are invited to enter and listen. The inner metal skin acts as an instrument, listening to the outer world and playing it back through a set of speakers. These sounds reflect and reverberate around the space. Essentially the pavilion is an ear capturing sounds from its immediate environment. Its geometries can intensify, resonate and distort these found sounds and act as a passive instrument, playing sounds of the city based on the occupier’s position within the structure.
The final piece in the Emergence Exhibition is “Sniff” by Karolina Sobecka and Jim George. Sniff is an interactive projection: an animated dog follows passers-by, discerns their behavior as friendly or aggressive, tries to engage them and forms a relationship with them based on the history of the interaction. As the viewer walks by the projection, their movements and gestures are tracked by a computer vision system. Sniff is an exploration of the moment of engagement.
It partly grew out of interest in philosophical discussion about the mind and mind theory, particularly in what’s termed the “commonplace” understanding of mental states and inferring of agency. Our automatic interpretation of behavior as social interaction is especially emblematic in a non-linguistic engagement with the ‘other’, which in case of Sniff produces a hybrid space of virtual and real emotions, social guess-work and mind modeling. Sniff is an attempt to trigger an intense, playful and insightful level of engagement at which we solve the “other minds” problem in everyday life. Sniff is inserted into our physical reality and follows its rules.
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.
