Several new hotel projects have recently opened their doors in the country. Among the is the Lánchíd 19 design hotel, facing the Danube at the foot of Buda’s Royal Palace, a re-launch of a veteran three-star hotel near the capital’s City Park.
The building and its interior are the result of an interesting collaboration between Hungarian architects, graphic artists, photographers and fashion designers.

The unique glass facade was designed by the groups Szövetség ‘39 and Nextlab. These two groups of young professionals, working on experimental developments, set up a workgroup of engineers, producers and co-artists for this project. The duty of this workgroup was to fill the architects’ idea with tangible content and, besides the unique technological solutions, to make an individual artwork. The huge fingerprint-patterns of the glass bridges in the atrium and the butterfly-pattern that can be seen on the front stone wall of the hotel are also the results of this design process.

The hotel’s moveable accordion-like glass façade is an autonomous artwork. It provides unique pictures in the night, so the hotel stands as a kind of ‘lighthouse’ on the Danube riverbank. The movement of the glass lamellas that are painted with tiny graphics generally follows the flow speed of the Danube, but based on the signals of the meteo-sensor on the top of the hotel, the movement intensifies in strong wind and smoothes when the wind stops.

via: www.lanchid19.blogspot.com

The FUSE music-television network, based in New York City, plays rock, alternative, punk, hardcore, emo and indie music. It claims a techsavvy audience ready to interact with the network via the Internet, cellphones and other wireless devices. Fuse recognized its product’s popularity, said Fuse VP of Operations Dave Alworth, but needed an equally effective “public” profile to contend as a new, New York City icon.

“Ultimately, the challenge we faced was how to use the signage to bring the Fuse television studio onto the sidewalk,” said Fitch’s studio director, George Kewin, AIA. “Vice versa, we also wanted to bring the viewing pedestrians ‘into’ the studio to have a more personal contact with the brand.” Fitch proposed four types of LED displays that formed a series of overlapping sightlines to constantly draw viewers’ attention, first to the building, then to the building’s windows. From a distance, the Fuse channel letters, in which videoscreens are embedded, are visible at least six blocks south. As pedestrians approach the building, a second sign system, a series of overhead, high-definition videoscreens, displays endlessly changing colors, video imagery and text messages across the building. For the third sign attraction, a “zipper” electronic message center snakes in and out of the serpentine contours of four, two-story-tall window bays, continues down into the sidewalk in front of the building and ends underneath the channel letters. Finally, surprised viewers watch as LED-display curtains fold and disappear behind the windows in front of them.

The curtain system comprises a mechanical framework that holds the
LED tubes in place as it folds in and out of the window bay and LED video tubes, which LED Effects Inc. (Rancho Cordova, CA) custom designed and inserted into the curtain frame. The original mechanical structure was acquired, according to MultimediaLED’s Bob Sawler, from a company in England, and then modified for this project. When closed, the curtains display a 6-ft.-tall video image. When opened, they fold back into a 12-in. storage space that allows an unobstructed view into the interior television studio.

Text by Louis M. Brill (louisbrill[at]sbcglobal.net)
Louis M. Brill is a journalist and consultant for high-tech entertainment and media communications.
Photos by MultimediaLEDs (Rancho Cordova, CA).

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A stunning lighting scheme has recently been designed, supplied, installed and programmed by Lightscape Projects, part of the Light Projects Group, for the Richard Desmond Children Eye Centre which forms part of the Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, UK.
The new building, designed by architects Penoyre & Prasad, is illuminated on the south side using RGB color changing LED lighting supplied by Light Projects and Tryka.

The LED lighting illuminates the façade by casting light on the underneath of the freely-placed, folded aluminium louvers, which the team has nicknamed “seagulls”, according to Light Projects’ Roger Beckett.
The building has an outer glass curtain wall, with the seagulls positioned on a tensioned cable net about 0.75 m away to protect the building from solar gain.
The LED lighting fixtures are positioned on gantries at each floor level. A total of 64 fixtures were used, including linear fittings and others to fit around the uneven shape of the building. Beckett says that the fixtures are about 80 mm from the glass wall and their light is directed towards the underside of the “seagulls”, with an angle of 50-degrees to the horizontal.

All the light goes away from the glass to prevent direct glare affecting the occupants. “The lighting is designed to be very comfortable for people inside the building,” says Beckett. The lighting system is controlled via a DMX 512 controller, using a Light Projects-designed program to create shifting light scenes with an imaginative mix of subtle colors. Beckett comments, “This project demonstrates how the improving synergy between architects and lighting designers can come together to turn building facades into magical events.”

Via: ledsmagazine

The Allianz Arena has a delightfully surreal appearance. The exterior is covered in tufted, translucent material; viewed from afar, the stadium resembles a giant, quilted doughnut. At night, it becomes positively radiant: the façade is lit from within, which means that the entire arena glows. (The windows of a hundred and six luxury boxes can be partially discerned behind the curved scrim.) On most evenings, the building emits a soft white light, reflecting the silvery tone of the synthetic skin, but on nights when one of the two Munich soccer clubs has a home game—the teams share the stadium—it changes its skin color: red for Bayern Munich, blue for the Munich Lions. The shifting lighting schemes atop the Empire State Building seem timid compared with this chameleon.

The arena retains its allure during the day. The unusual material—ETFE, or ethylene tetra fluoro ethylene—gives the stadium a cushiony texture, as if it were an oversized, permanently moored blimp; you want to climb up and touch it. And its subtle white hue eerily duplicates the Munich sky on a cloudy winter afternoon—the stadium practically disappears. In the sun, it brightens. The 2,760 tufts—made of two sheets of ETFE, each 0.2 millimetres thick, which are sewn together and filled with air—are arranged in a strict diamond pattern, giving the façade a subtle sleekness. There are obvious jokes to be made about the Allianz Arena—one could say that it resembles the Michelin Man, or even a soccer ball—but Herzog and de Meuron are too good to play trite visual games, and the building easily transcends such literal-minded comparisons.

via: newyorker.com