Responsive/Interactive ArchitectureEnriching Urban Spaces with Interactive/

Entertaining Lighting

Architecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

What is prescribed architecture?.

Ex: Beijing National Aquatics

Center (Lighting)

Ex: UN Studio’s Galleria Department Store façade in Seoul (Lighting)

What is responsive architecture?.

Ex: Sony Center am Potsdamer Platz | Funkturm Berlin (Lighting)

In the age of knowledge, architecture is the storyteller.

Architecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

Ex: UN Studio’s La Defense project in the Netherlands(Lighting)

What is interactive architecture?.

Ex: Thomas Heatherwick’s Rolling Bridge

Ex: Under Scan, artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Lighting)

Ex: Volume, a 2006 installation at London's Victoria and Albert Museum (Lighting)

Ex: Dune | Studio Roosegaarde, interactive landscape (Lighting)

Architecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

• It is a particular kind of pre-conceived story, performance, or event unfolding over time. With a clear beginning and end that are made, packaged, and then received, it is entirely pre-scripted.

Film Guild Cinema created by architect Fredrick Kiesler

• Ex. Film Guild Cinema created by architect Fredrick Kiesler

• It no longer exists, but remains one of the most progressive film theater designs to this day. The film screen was a lens that functioned like the pupil of an eye, expanding and contracting to fit the different shapes and sizes of screens and eliminating the need for curtains

• Synchronized with it was a multiple projection system that extended across the walls and ceiling

Architecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

Thomas Heatherwick’s sculptural Sitooterie restaurant

Beijing National Aquatics Center

Architecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

Beijing National Aquatics Center

• lighting designer Zhen Jianwei• Concept: visualize the energy

flow of the Chinese people• The lighting system consists of a

program that collects emoticons used every day by millions of users on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo (the Chinese counterpart to Twitter), and then interprets them to form an overview of the mood of the Chinese people.

• These moods—anger, happiness, depression, excitement—are expressed in subtle gradients of colors.

LEDs integrated into the pillow frames

London’s Business Design Centre London’s EyeSteiermärkische Bank in Graz, Austria

General Definition:

The Sony Center in Berlin, Germany, is an internationalcommercial, communication, and cultural hub that drawsnearly 8.3 million visitors a year.

Components:

• The focal point of the complex is The Forum, a roofedpublic square.

• Constructed of steel, glass, and cloth streamers, theForum's roof is the Sony Center's most prominentarchitectural element.

• At night, the roof comes alive with fascinating lightshows

• designed by Paris project artist Yann Kersale, in varyingshades of cyan and magenta.

Why new lighting system?

The Forum's original incandescent lighting system had been inplace for twelve years. After constant operation, it wasreaching its maximum life expectancy and had become toocostly to maintain. The Sony Center was looking for areplacement system that was long-lasting, energy-efficient,and low-maintenance, but that could still create color-changing light shows.

Sony Center, Berlin, Germany

Design Target:“bringing the whole Sony Center to life”

• The team from solution provider Alexander Weckmer Licht undMediensysteme GmbH had to deliver a solution that could provide powerfuland uniform illumination of the unique fan-like geometry of the roof.

• Since each individual "sail" of the fan had varying dimensions, slope, andshape, each fixture would have to be individually positioned to achieveuniform illumination.

• They installed Philips Color Kinetics ColorReach Powercore and ColorBlastPowercore LED floodlighting fixtures, which were powerful and flexibleenough to achieve all of the project's goals.

Lighting Technology:

With the new full-color LED lighting fixtures and high-bandwidth digital control,the Sony Center can now choose from more than 16 million colors,can create new

light shows for special events such as film opening nights and holidays — allwhile cutting energy consumption by 73% .

Architecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

• Responsive architecture is most simply defined as a space that responds to its environment but has no agency

• It absorbs information from its general environment and responds to it in some way but people cannot actively affect or change its behavior

• sound and light sculptures absorbed data from their environment and translated it into kinetic performances.

UN Studio’s Galleria Department Store façade in Seoul

• Lighting Design: Arup Lighting, Rogier• skin made from 4,330 glass discs backed with a dichroic

adhesive film. Digitally controlled LEDs behind each disc emit a changing landscape of color at night, driven by variables in the environment. Tabard Square’s barometer controlled beacon

• LED lighting manufacturer Xilver delivered 5000 color changing LED lights

• The Galleria is completely covered by a series of 80 cm-diameter frosted glass discs which are backlit by LED lights

• The LEDs change the color of each of the discs and thus enable the creation of a vivid play of colors and graphics to be displayed on the exterior of the store

• Xilver developed a controller that can control up to 4 individual RGB LED lights called RainDrops. These RainDrops are individually addressable and thus controllable through any DMX-512 device

(a standard for digital communication networks that are commonly used to control stage lighting and effects).

• special software to automatically adjust the intensity and wavelength of each fixture related to the LEDs used from a particular binning

LED Lights

http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/2005/01/leds-transform-department-store-in-seoul.html

urban architectural design

• Software provides DMX signals to the lights. • In normal cases, hardware could handle 16 DMX lines, while in

this case we had to control 32 lines. In total something like

15,000 DMX channels are controlled by E:Cue's Programmer software and 8 E-Link Ethernet nodes.

• Each lighting fixture of Xilver acts as a pixel of a video screen.• The E:Cue programmer software intelligently combines lighting

control with the display of videos and bitmaps through the Xilver color changing LED lighting fixtures

• All kind of effects can be added easily to these images (special

occasions, and can be changed over time according to seasons, fashion events and artistic inspirations)

During the day the atmospheric and weather changes influence the degree of reflection and absorption of light and color on the glass circles, so that from different viewing points the appearance of each disc and the total surface changes constantly according to those external conditions that are beyond human control.

Architecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

• Interactivity essentially means that both people and buildings have agency, enabling the creation of conversations between the two in real-time.

• Interactive Architecture is a processes of 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.

• Interactive Architecture includes contributions from the worlds of architecture, industrial design, computer programming, engineering, and physical computing.

Computer Numerical Control (CNC)

Architecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

• Creates environments facilitate interaction between people.

• These space are able to reconfigure themselves in response to human stimuli-will literally change our worlds by addressing our ever-evolving individual, social, and environmental needs.

• Allowing technology to evolve naturally, it replaces static forms that are set and stable with living, interactive spaces that can be many different things to many different people.

• Instead of being just the venue for storytelling (whether in libraries, churches, theaters, offices, homes, or sports arenas), this intelligent, kinetic architecture itself becomes the storyteller.

Architecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

• Interactivity essentially means that both people and buildings have agency, enabling the creation of conversations between the two in real-time.

uses reflective material effects to create a heightened relationship between architecture and its

environment. Coated in its entirety with a unique 3M-developed diachronic foil, the façade

absorbs its environment and reflects it back through a spectrum of colors.

UN Studio’s La Defense project in the Netherlands

Architecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

Inspired by the Oscar ceremonies’ red carpet procession and operated by hydraulic ramps set in the handrails, the bridge rolls and unrolls. Here, using simple mechanics, the bridge responds to the needs of the city by either opening the water passage or creating a passage for people.

Thomas Heatherwick’s Rolling Bridge

Architecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

large-scale public art project Under Scan is an installation of thousands of video portraits projected into town squares in England. The portraits are camouflaged by floodlights and are revealed when people pass through the square. These digital portraits interact with the pedestrians, turning away as pedestrians lose interest and walk away. Under Scan embodies the ideas of interactive architecture: a space that, through intelligent exchanges, creates highly curated, personalized, and reactive responses. These blur the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, engaging the audience in endless conversations.

Under Scan, artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

• To explore themes of self-representation, participants were filmed for up to three minutes, freely portraying themselves doing whatever they felt best represented them.

• Passers-by were detected by a computerised tracking system, which activated the video portraits and projected them within their shadow.

• The portraits 'woke up' and established eye contact with the viewer as soon as his or her shadow 'revealed' them. As the viewer walked away, the portraits reacted by looking away, and eventually disappeared if no-one activated them.

• Every seven minutes the entire installation stopped and reset itself, revealing the tracking system in a brief sequence which projected all of the calibration grids used by the computerised surveillance system.

Architecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

Positioned dramatically in the center of the museum’s garden, a field of light and sound sculptures responded to human movement, creating endless and everchanging audio-visual experiences for its visitors. This interactive piece created a kinetic narrative space that engaged both the environment and its users in active, real-time conversations.

Volume, a 2006 installation at London's Victoria and Albert Museum

Dune | Studio RoosegaardeArchitecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

• public interactive landscape that interacts with human behavior

• This hybrid of nature and technology is composed of large amounts of fibers that brighten according to the sounds and motion of passing visitors

• DUNE enhances social interactions in the public pedestrian Maastunnel

Dune | Studio RoosegaardeArchitecture as media: the evolution

The prescribed

The responsive

The interactive

• public interactive landscape that interacts with human behavior

• utilizes fewer than 60 watts of energy.

DUNE 4.2, situated alongside the Maas River in Rotterdam (NL)

Conclusion• Various urban spaces can be transformed into interactive spaces

using low-cost, lightweight interactive lighting.• Most current design examples of interactive architecture, i.e.

responsive digital environments, are large, rather expensive projects carried out and displayed in high-tech buildings and museums.

• In carrying out this kind of projects in public spaces not originally designed for installations and events of this kind, a large number of practical concerns are encountered ; that need to be dealt with:

1. issues of access to the power grid, 2. changing weather condition, 3. stakeholders and gatekeepers with different perspectives4. issues of safety and vandalization.

References• http://rice.iuav.it/221/1/04_zarin-fallmann.pdf

• https://segd.org/interactive-architecture

• http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/emoji-in-light-on-the-beijing-water-cube/

• http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/2005/01/leds-transform-department-store-in-seoul.html

• https://www.google.com/search?q=Under+Scan&newwindow=1&biw=1280&bih=656&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=5h3uVLnOMInLPYLTgIAG&ved=0CAcQ_AUoATgK#imgdii=_&imgrc=-lpNzZc9jIStLM%253A%3BmNdKtlG7JTun4M%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fcdn.trendhunterstatic.com%252Fthumbs%252Funder-scan-project-interactive-video-shadows.jpeg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.trendhunter.com%252Ftrends%252Funder-scan-project-interactive-video-shadows%3B300%3B470

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