Nicholas Szczepaniak will recieve the RIBA Silver Medal next month for his extraordinary graduate project “A Defensive Architecture”. I am delighted to be the first person to be publishing his work in my recently release book “Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands“. Nick’s work really is out on the hinterlands, a landscape plighted by climate change and rising water levels, social order breaks down, resources become rationed and public space becomes further militarised to maintain social order. Set in the Blackwater Estuary, Essex, his allegorical and provocative defensive architectures envisage the construction of a set of austere coastal defence towers that perform multiple functions within this dystopian future.

The militarised towers are alive — breathing, creaking, groaning, sweating and crying when stressed. Airbags on the face of the towers expand and contract, while hundreds of tensile trunks are sporadically activated, casting water onto the heated facades producing steam. An empty watchtower at the top of each tower gives the impression that the fragile landscape below is being constantly surveyed.

Across the estuary, a bed of salt marshes provides a natural form of flood defence and habitats for wildlife. Due to rising water levels and adverse weather conditions, the salt marshes are quickly deteriorating. The proposal suggests that mega structures can be integrated into, and encourage, the growth of natural defence mechanisms.

Over time, sand is collected at the base of each tower to form a spit across the mouth of the estuary, absorbing energy from the waves. Internally, the towers serve as a vast repository for mankind’s most valuable asset — knowledge. The architecture is an ark, protecting books from cumulative and catastrophic deterioration.

Early experiments with sugar and caramel were used to develop a prototypical object that responds to its surrounding climate. When heat is applied to sugar, its molecular arrangement is changed to form caramel. A series of experiments with domestic objects demonstrated how molten caramel can be extruded in a state of tension, then left to set to act in compression. Thin sheets, up to one metre in height, were also formed and then hung as a curtain. Responding to environmental conditions, these objects would crack, split, absorb moisture and dilapidate. They became indicators of climate change and became beacons of abnormal environmental conditions.

Szczepaniak’s project identified repetition, control, anticipated tension and surveying from an elevated position as properties crucial to his architecture. These evolved through an intensive process of speculative drawing, model making and a series of analogue and digital collage techniques. Studies were made of defensive typologies, in particular watchtowers and the Maze prison, built at the height of the Northern Irish Conflict… More information on this project is features in Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands

Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands is a collection of provocative projects from a young generation of digitally enabled designers. This publication oscillates between the analog and the digital, from concept to realisation, mapping processes as it explores the diverse digital paths that lead innovative spaces, poetic narratives and social interactions.

sixteen* (makers), 55/02 Shelter, Kielder Forest, UK

The book covers a spectrum of London’s leading graduates and young practices, featuring projects from the Architectural Association, Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), University of Westminster and Royal College of Art, and case studies and interviews with architects including Amanda Levete Architects, Plasma Studio, JDS Architects, sixteen* (makers), Horhizon, marcosandmarjan, Mette Ramsgard Thomsen, Philip Beesley, David Greene, Samantha Hardingham, Usman Haque and Neil Spiller.

Tarek Shamma, “Circus Lumens”

I’m pleased to announce that “Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands” is now available. Co-Authored by myself (Ruairi Glynn) and Sara Shafiei it has been a real pleasure to put together a book that is intended to expand the envelope of what we might conside “Digital” Architecture to be.

Christian Kerrigan, “The 200 Year Continuum”

I would like to thank all of the architects and artists who have contributed their inspiring work and thank our exceptional graphic designer Emily Chicken bringing it all together with such elegance.

David Greene of Archigram and Samantha Hardingham’s recent L.A.W.U.N.* Project

I am also pleased to announce that one of the young graduates featuring in the book Nick Szczepaniak, has just been awarded the RIBA Silver Medal (The highest award in the UK for student design work) and we are thrilled to be the first publication to be presenting his work. More posts will follow presenting some of the other work featuring in the book and a preview of its contents can be seen here.

Nick Szczepaniak, “A Defensive Architecture”

Living Light by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang (aka “The Living“) is a permanent outdoor pavilion in the heart of Seoul with a dynamic skin that glows and blinks in response to both data about air quality and public interest in the environment. The skin of the pavilion is a giant map of Seoul with the 27 neighborhood (gu) boundaries redrawn based on existing air quality sensors of the Korean Ministry of Environment—each shape in this new map encloses the air closest to one of the sensors. Then the map illuminates to become an interactive, environmental building facade. Citizens can enter the pavilion or view it from nearby streets and buildings, and they can text message the building and it will text them back.

Living Light (Seoul, 2009) from David Benjamin on Vimeo.

This structure in a public park not only provides a canopy and a tactile enclosure, it also suggests that a building facade itself can become a new kind of public space. It can offer important real-time information about our shared resources and our collective concerns. The Living are also showing their work at the current Toward the Sentient City exhibition in New York. See previous post for more details.

An exhibition critically exploring the evolving relationship between ubiquitous computing, architecture, and urban space. Curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League of New York

www.sentientcity.net

As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets, and public spaces of the world around us, we increasingly find information processing capacity embedded within and distributed throughout the material fabric of everday urban space. Artifacts and systems we interact with on a daily basis collect, store, and process information about us, or are activated by our movements and transactions. Ubiquitous computing evangelists herald a coming age of urban infrastructure capable of sensing and responding to the events and activities transpiring around them. Imbued with the capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, this near-future “sentient” city is envisioned as being capable of reflexively monitoring its environment and our behavior within it, becoming an active agent in the organization of everyday life in urban public space.

Toward the Sentient City explores alternate trajectories for the design and inhabitation of this near-future urban environment. Organized around five newly commissioned projects distributed throughout the city, the exhibition features:
Natural Fuse by Usman Haque, creative director, Nitipak ‘Dot’ Samsen, designer, Ai Hasegawa, designer, Cesar Harada, designer. Barbara Jasinowicz, producer

Too Smart City by JooYoun Paek, David Jimison | Engineers: Daniel Bauen, Aaron Gilbert, Bill Washabaugh
Amphibious Architecture by The Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Directors David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang) and xdesign Environmental Health Clinic at New York University (Director Natalie Jeremijenko)
Trash Track by SENSEable City Laboratory, MIT | Carlo Ratti: Director, Assaf Biderman: Associate Director, Rex Britter: Advisor, Stephen Miles: Advisor, Kristian Kloeckl Project Leader, Musstanser Tinauli, E Roon Kang, Alan Anderson, Avid Boustani, Natalia Duque Ciceri, Lorenzo Davolli, Samantha Earl, Lewis Girod, Sarabjit Kaur, Armin Linke, Eugenio Morello, Sarah Neilson, Giovanni de Niederhausern, Jill Passano, Renato Rinaldi, Francisca Rojas, Louis Sirota, Malima Wolf
Breakout! by Anthony Townsend (Institute for the Future), Georgia Borden, Amanda Kross, Jung Hoon Kim, Antonina Simeti (DEGW), Dana Spiegel (NYCwireless), Laura Forlano (Parsons The New School for Design), Tony Bacigalupo (New Work City), Sean Savage (PariSoMa), Elysse Preposi (Sarah Lawrence College)

Also see the “Open Archive“, a collection of video documentation of existing projects related to the themes of the exhibition. The Archive is designed to grow over the course of the exhibition based on suggestions and contributions received through an open submission process.

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

By far one of the most interesting urban screens project I’ve seen to date, Chris O’Shea’s describes his public art “Hand From Above” as encouraging “us to question our normal routine when we often find ourselves rushing from one destination to another.”

“Inspired by Land of the Giants and Goliath, we are reminded of mythical stories by mischievously unleashing a giant hand from the BBC Big Screen. Passers by will be playfully transformed. What if humans weren’t on top of the food chain? Unsuspecting pedestrians will be tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity.” Hands from Above was built using openFrameworks & openCV.

Made up of 700 meters of aluminium, 6750 LED’s and 5060 m of cables Lab[au]’s Framework f5×5x5 is an interactive kinetic light sculpture, extending the bi-dimensional screen space, by transposition of its pixel resolution to the physical space. Conceived as a modular infrastructure, f5×5x5 is a communication and computation system, propagating in form of light and sound the events it inhabits. Presence and motion create and alter the transmitted data, and propagation of this data becomes a space-time parameter.

The term framework refers to informatics’ modular workspace, called a framework. Here, f5×5x5’s ‘frames’ constitute the framework, a space built up by five modules of 2×2m, divided in 5×5 squared elements, establishing a matrix of 5×5x5 = 125 modules. On one side diffusing the light (white), on the other absorbing the light (black), the modules constitute a binary language (0,1) and a space of 125 pixels, allowing to transcribe captured data from the physical environment in a kinetic and luminous play _ in between opening and closing, in between transparency and reflection, in between light and dark.

“Crystal Mesh consists of a tessellated pattern made of 3,000 modules of deep-drawn polycarbonate covering a façade area of more than 5,000 m2. About 1,900 of these modules contain a regular matrix of compact fluorescent light tubes forming “active patches” within the façade. At night the light matrix superimposes the idiosyncratic physical structure of the white, crystalline daytime façade. But the irregular arrangement of these patches – dividing the façade into areas with different resolutions – does not create a large, homogeneous screen in front of the building, but instead forms a more general impression of the building’s “medianess” as an addition to and an essential ingredient of its architecture.”

realities:united are probably best known for the BIX facade the created for Kunsthaus Graz (Austria) in 2003, and since then have built up a great body of work exploring an expanding world of ornamental media architecture. Whilst I still have a soft spot for the BIX project, one of the things that I really like about Crystal Mesh is the way that realities:united have created a sculptural facade where each pixel is in fact not one pixel at all, but an animatable cluster of them. The result is a kind of sub-resolution, where each crystal in the mesh can act as one object, or it’s subpixels can be individually controlled to create a really unique movement of light across the surface of the facade.

CRYSTAL MESH from autokolor on Vimeo.

In the crystal mesh project realities:united once again shy away from jumping on the LED bandwagon like (most of) the rest of the world, and stick with good old fluorescent lamps. The facade covers a total area of 5180m2 of which 2550m2 are equipped as a media installation. The installation is made up of 6069 individually controllable 36W fluorescent bulbs. Whilst that’s a hefty 234kW power consumption (theoretical maximum with all lamps on), in normal operation the actual brightness for grey scale images is limited by software to approx. 70% brightness resulting in a max. power consumption of 127kW. The estimated power consumption in typical operation mode is approx. 85kW equaling 0.03kW/m2 (29 Watts/m2).

The full opening of the completed façade installation and the start of the projected artistic program on Crystal Mesh is scheduled for 12/2009.

Project credits

Client:
Jack Investment Pte. Ltd. (Singapore)

Architecture:
WOHA Architects, Singapore

Crystal Mesh (Media) Façade Design:
realities:united, studio for art and architecture (Berlin) in collaboration with WOHA Architects, Singapore

Current (starting 15.8.2009) Video Art Piece
autokolor (Berlin)

Media Façade Software Development:
thismedia (Berlin)

Realization / Technology
Million Lighting Co Pte Ltd (Singapore) with:
Kurihara Kogyo Co., LTD. (Singapore Branch)
Fritz Borsi Gmbh & Co. KG (Germany)
SE Lightmanagement AG (Switzerland)

Links

WOHA architects
http://www.woha-architects.com/

realities:united office
http://www.realities-united.de

Crystal Mesh project page
http://www.realities-united.de/#PROJECT,138,1

Digital Hinterlands features a diverse range of work by some of the best recent architecture graduates from London’s Architectural Association, Bartlett, Royal College of Art, and University of Westminster. Organised by Ruairi Glynn and curated in consultation with Arup, this exhibition reveals how the latest computational design and rapid manufacturing processes are providing new ways of understanding and designing space. From built models, 1:1 fragments, material experiments and installations, to interactive devices, virtual worlds and robotics, this exhibition presents the ideas of a wave of young designers, operating on the speculative hinterlands of architectural design.

The Private View of the Digital Hinterlands Exhibition is on the 21st September to coincide with the Digital Architecture London Conference, as part of London Digital Week

The Bartlett School of Architecture has the most comprehensive digital fabrication suite dedicated to education and research out of all UK Built Environment Departments and Faculties. The suite includes a £500,000 3D printing and laser sintering facility and advanced 3D digital fabrication machinery for wood, plastic and metal.

The Bartlett is offering places on this cutting edge course for up to 50 qualified applicants. Students will learn how to export handmade models into a digital format, and how to construct digital models for 3D printing or prototyping in nylon, wood and metal.

Students are expected to bring a design proposal to the course that can be used to explore different modes of 3D digital representation and fabrication. The design proposal can be in the form of a physical model, 2D digital drawings or 3D digital representations. Possible design proposals include a building, a fragment of a building, a component, a piece of furniture, a piece of jewellery, a sculpture or a decorative item.

The course lasts for 4 weeks, is full time, where the majority of learning is project based and developed in tutorials. The first 4-week course includes free attendance to the Digital Architecture Conference 2009.

Workshop Website

I’ve been busy over the past couple of weeks putting the final touches to the first Digital Architecture London conference and I’m pleased to say that I’ve got everyone I really wanted to speak at the event to agree to join in. If your in London on September 21st, I hope you can make it. Speakers include Patrik Schumacher, Neil Spiller, Brett Steele, Tony Dunne, Geoff Manaugh, Usman Haque, Murray Fraser, Hanif Kara, Rachel Armstrong, Bob Sheil, Charles Walker, Tobi Schneidler, Marcos Cruz, Alvin Huang, Matt Webb, Stephen Gage, Alan Penn, Marjan Colletti and Daniel Bosia. Check out the programme for more details on the speakers http://www.digital-architecture.org/london/programme/. The event is being held as part of London Digital Week which will be occurring alongside the London Design Festival.

Below is the press release.

To celebrate London as a centre of design and innovation, the ‘Digital Architecture London’ Conference will take place at the Building Centre on 21st September 2009. Presenting a selection of London’s leading architects, artists, designers and engineers, the conference will examine how London is shaping the digital future of the built environment.

Introducing the latest developments in digital design practice, the conference will explore new spaces, social interactions, design and fabrication processes, and speculate on architecture’s post-digital futures.

Book now to secure your place:
http://www.digital-architecture.org/london/tickets/

Speakers include:

Patrik Schumacher, Director and Partner, Zaha Hadid Architects and Co-Founder, Design Research Laboratory, Architectural Association.

Neil Spiller, author of Digital Architecture Now [2008], Visionary Architecture [2007] and many more; Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory; and Director of AVATAR at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Brett Steele, Director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture and AA Publications; and Co-founder and former Director of the AADRL.

Tony Dunne, Professor and Head of the Design Interactions Department at the Royal College of Art; and Co-founder of Dunne & Raby.

Geoff Manaugh, Author of the popular website BLDGBLOG and recently of The BLDGBLOG Book, Chronicle Books [2009].

Usman Haque, Director of Haque Design; Research and founder of Pachube.com; and recent recipient of the 2009 World Technology Award (Art), Design Museum, 2008 (Interactive) Design of the Year Award and Wellcome Trust Sciart Award.

As well as Murray Fraser, Hanif Kara (tbc), Rachel Armstrong, Bob Sheil, Charles Walker, Tobi Schneidler, Marcos Cruz, Alvin Huang, Matt Webb, Stephen Gage, Ruairi Glynn, Alan Penn, Marjan Colletti and more.

http://www.digital-architecture.org/london/programme/

Ticket Price: £55 inc VAT
A Limited number of Student Tickets are available at £15 inc VAT
Book at http://www.digital-architecture.org/london/tickets/