“The distinct and iconic architectural design for the Grand Lisboa was inspired by the lotus symbol of Macau combined with the flamboyancy of headdress plumes of Brazilian dancers and the exquisite intrigue of a Fabergé egg. At night, the base is a kaleidoscope of colours thanks to 1.2 million light emitting diodes (LEDs) on its surface.
The Grand Lisboa is one of Macau’s tallest buildings with 52 storeys. In phase two, it will open a 430 room hotel.
Grand Lisboa will offer our guests a truly memorable and unique experience. Stylistically, a daring and contemporary entertainment attraction, it remains true to our history and heritage within the Macau market, while reflecting the progressive direction of the organisation,” explained Dr Stanley Ho.
The owner, Dr. Ho, was advised by a fengshui expert that the location and architectural design would loose money, unless he made revisions to change the fengshui energy. So Dr. Ho made the necessary changes, and had the top of the building designed to be like a bottle neck, so money comes in, but cannot come out easily. It was supposed to look like feather plumes”
Grand Lisboa media facade was conceived by Magic Monkey
This project has been shown at the Media Facades Exhbition Berlin 2008 and was published in the Exhibition Companion
(download the Catalogue Pdf – 7 Mb).
Filed under: Projects
Posted: June 4, 2008 at 2:36 pm by Gernot Tscherteu
SmartSlab has attracted quite some attention since it was introduced a few years ago by b consultants ltd, an architectural consultancy run by Tom Barker. It is specifically unique due to its resistant structure and modular approach: the screen is shipped in 600 x 600mm tiles that can be built up into large arrays of any size. The steel and polycarbonate structure allows it to be even used as flooring or curtain walls in buildings.
Another very unique quality of the SmartSlab is that it uses hexagonal pixels – ‘hexels’. This concept is based on the fly’s compound eye and achieves a better optical appearance than conventional screen pixels, since the hexels are always equidistant to each other. Each tile comprises 672 hexels.
The screens can run any Quicktime movie or DVD as well as Quartz Composer applications, which allows designers and researchers to develop dynamic visualizations or even interactive applications based on webcam vision tracking, WII controllers, etc.
The SmartSlab at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planing currently shows digital artworks created by students from the Design Computing program. Researchers at the group are currently investigating interactive application scenarios that take the physical context of the yard into consideration. On the long run the screen will be integrated into the buildings façade to achieve better visibility from long distances.
We will post additional information as the project progresses.
Filed under: Projects
Posted: May 26, 2008 at 8:20 am by Martin Tomitsch
Walking down the Ginza is like strolling through a glossy magazine – and these buildings are the ads. These brand images are largely communicated through the facades, which increasingly resemble screens. The Chanel store uses a facade composed of hundreds of thousands of LEDs – a high-res building-sized video screen. Uniqlo is an exception to the high end brands in Ginza – having built its brand providing basic clothing at reasonable prices. So in contrast to the sleekness of the other facades, our approach at Uniqlo Ginza was to go simple and basic.
If facades are now screens, our Uniqlo facade is a pixilated “electro-retro” version. It is made up of a matrix of one thousand illuminated cells, whose luminosity can be individually controlled to produce chunky Tetris-style patterns on the facade. A mirror-finish stainless steel grid placed over this screen has the effect of breaking up and blurring off its sharp edges. The four-square Uniqlo logo shines through all, lit up with a bright LED array. Luxury, at low-res.
FLARE is a modular system to create a dynamic hull for facades or any building or wall surface. Acting like a living skin, it allows a building to express, communicate and interact with its environment. FLARE turns the building facade into a penetrable kinetic membrane, breaking with all conventions of the building surface as a static skin.
FLARE units
The FLARE system consists of a number of tiltable metal flake bodies supplemented by individually controllable pneumatic cylinders.
Due to the developed pattern, an infinite array of flakes can be mounted on any building or wall surface in a modular system of multiplied FLARE units.
The visual effect
Each stainless steel flake reflects the bright sky or sunlight when in vertical standby position. When the flake is tilted downwards by a computer controlled pneumatic piston, its face is shaded from the sky light and this way appears as a dark pixel.
By reflecting ambient or direct sunlight, the individual flakes of the FLARE system act like pixels formed by natural light.
The system is controlled by a computer to form any kind of surface animation. Sensor systems inside and outside the building communicate the buildings activity directly to the FLARE system which acts as the buildings lateral line.
This project has been shown at the Media Facades Exhbition Berlin 2008 and was published in the Exhibition Companion
(download the Catalogue Pdf – 7 Mb).
Filed under: Products
Posted: May 7, 2008 at 3:56 pm by Wolfgang Leeb
“nature04″ is a Computer controlled light work for Lille 2004 – European Cultural Capital, 2004 by Kurt Hentschäger. The project transforms the 20 story Lilleurope Tower into a luminous kinetic sculpture. It´s dramaturgy is based on the idea of a jaquemart, a mechanical public clockwork, the basis of our technologically advanced culture. The mechanical clock, giving the time by slicing it up in standardized temporal units, marks the final transition from experiencing time as a continuum without a beginning and an end to perceiving it as sequential, as a sequence of discrete events lined up on a timeline.
“nature04″ is taking the concepts of time, sequence and the matrix to create a contemporary jaquemart, an ephemeral clockwork composed of animated lights, a clock of light displaying specific kinetic patterns and prints throughout the night. In cycles, bursts of light spread over the sides of the tower and then, subside again, like a wave that has washed ashore and emptied itself. Eventually there is only darkness and stillness – the tower rests as if exhausted by all the excitement displayed. Regaining “consciousness” at specific moments, these light patterns, often display static icons on the screen at the conclusion of a sequence of waves, functioning like punctuation marks along the timeline.
GreenPix – Zero Energy Media Wall – is a groundbreaking project applying sustainable and digital mediatechnology to the curtain wall of Xicui entertainment complex in Beijing, near the site of the 2008 Olympics.Featuring the largest color LED display worldwide and the first photovoltaic system integrated into a glass curtain wall in China, the building performs as a self-sufficient organic system, harvesting solar energy by day and using it to illuminate the screen after dark, mirroring a day’s climatic cycle.The Media Wall will provide the city of Beijing with its first venue dedicated to digital media art, while offering the most radical example of sustainable technology applied to an entire building’s envelope to date. The building will open to the public in May 2008, with a specially commissioned program of video installations and live performances by artists from China, Europe and the US.The project was designed and implemented by Simone Giostra & Partners, a New York-based office with a solid reputation for its innovative curtain walls in Europe and the US, with lighting design and façade engineering by Arup in London and Beijing. Content manager Luisa Gui will coordinate the opening program with software development by New York-based media artist Jeremy Rotsztain.
Greenpix behaves like an organic system, absorbing solar energy during the day and then generating light from the same power that evening. The project promotes the uncompromised integration of sustainable technology in new Chinese architecture, responding to the aggressive and unregulated economic development currently undertaken by the industry, often at the expense of the environment.With the support of leading German manufacturers Schueco and SunWays, the architect Simone Giostra with Arup developed a new technology for laminating photovoltaic cells in a glass curtain wall and oversaw the production of the first glass solar panels by Chinese manufacturer SunTech. The polycrystalline photovoltaic cells are laminated within the glass of the curtain wall and placed with changing density on the entire building’s skin.The density pattern increases building’s performance, allowing natural light when required by interior program, while reducing heat gain and transforming excessive solar radiation into energy for the media wall.
GreenPix is a large-scale display comprising of 2,292 color (RGB) LED’s light points comparable to a 24,000 sq. ft. (2.200 m2) monitor screen for dynamic content display. The very large scale and the characteristic low resolution of the screen enhances the abstract visual qualities of the medium, providing an art-specific communication form in contrast to commercial applications of high resolution screens in conventional media façades.
This project has been shown at the Media Facades Exhbition Berlin 2008 and was published in the Exhibition Companion
(download the Catalogue Pdf – 7 Mb).
JetBlue knows its customers, thanks to an innovative traveling exhibit designed to capture its passengers’ innermost thoughts.
Known as “The Story Booth,” the interactive exhibit encouraged visitors to share their favorite JetBlue stories, which were filmed for use on the airline’s website and in its advertising campaigns. In order to attract visitors to the exhibit during its 10-city tour, the exterior had to be dynamic and eye catching. Color Kinetics’ LED lighting technology proved to be just the right tool.
The booth measured 16 feet long by 10.5 feet high, enclosing a simple automated audio/video recording system to capture visitors’ stories. To animate the booth’s exterior, 10,000 nodes of iColor Flex® SL were mounted behind translucent panels installed on a steel frame on one side of the booth. Additionally, 700 larger nodes of iColor Flex SLX were installed on the two adjoining sides of the booth, essentially wrapping it with points of dynamic light. The nodes are individually addressable, which allows them to act as pixels for low-resolution video displays.
Because the booth was built to travel, durability and simplicity were paramount. The low power draw of the iColor Flex SL and iColor Flex SLX nodes allowed for easy set-up in each city without complex electrical requirements. “We had a whole video wall that used less than four 20-amp circuits of power, which is very low considering the scale of 10,700 nodes,” said Lazer. The booth was transported from city-to-city by flatbed truck with the entire Color Kinetics installation remaining intact.
In 2002, Ned Kahn worked with the staff of Technorama, the major science center in Switzerland, and their architects, Durig and Rami, to create a facade for the building which is composed of thousands of aluminum panels that move in the air currents and reveal the complex patterns of turbulence in the wind. The facade is visible from the large urban plaza in front of the museum.
Troika has been commissioned by Artwise Curators to create ‘All the time in the world’, a 22m long electroluminescent wall that marks the entrance to the First and Concorde Galleries lounges in the new Heathrow Terminal 5. ‘All the time in the World’ extends the conventional notion of a world clock, which commonly concentrates on capital cities in different time zones, by linking real time to places with exciting and romantic associations.
For ‘All the time in the world’ we developed a new typology of electroluminescent displays, called ‘Firefly’, which relies on a custom-designed segmented typeface (patent pending.) Apart form its incredible thinness (less than a millimeter), our display boosts high aesthetic impact and an extreme versatility in the characters displayed (up to five different fonts can be shown in our arrangement). This modular approached also allowed us to animate the letters as if they were hand written onto the display, a feature that was at the very origin of our research.
The resulting display has unique properties: it doesn’t cast light and disturbing shadow on its surrounding, it can be curved, and is extremely competitive compared to other display technologies such as LED if text only is required. Based on a vectorial design, its advantages are all the more noticeable in large scale (like here) or very small. The technique is transferable to other emerging technology such as OLED, PLED or E-paper. This is the first time that a display system of this kind has been implemented worldwide.
MIKONTALOLIGHTS seems to be inspired by the good old blinkenlight project, both in respect to aesthetics and enthusiasm. Here’s what their website says:
“Over the years TOAS Mikontalo has been residence for thousands of students from all over the world. ‘Mikkis’ is one of the best known (both liked and disliked) dormitories in Finland. With the currently ongoing renovation, Mikontalo will be reborn. However, before this, one thing had to be done… MIKONTALOLIGHTS.
The object of MIKONTALOLIGHTS was to create the world’s physically largest colored graphics platform by using the windows of Mikontalo’s D-staircase as light pixels. The platform was used to play Tetris and other games and present demos created by the students of Tampere University of Technology. The project climax was on December the 4th when the new lights of Mikontalo were lit. The goal was to gain global visibility for Tampere University of Technology and the rich student culture of the Uni.
The public event of MIKONTALOLIGHTS was a tremendous success. There were more than 2000 spectators at once and total count of interested spectators was close to 4000.”
