Media Architecture Institute

Call for Participation
CHI 2011 Workshop on Large Displays in Urban Life – from Exhibition Halls to Media Facades
Submission DL 14th of January 2011
http://largedisplaysinurbanlife.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/

The history of Olympics and Expos is one of heaviness– of mass and monumentality and conspicuous expenditure on immovable objects whose legacy has occasionally endured, but have always been outdated. Our most extraordinary contemporary feats of engineering are more stealthy, more extensive and more invisible than these traditions of glass and brickand steel: Code rather than Carbon.

The Indemann was designed by the Maastricht architecture firm Maurer United Architects as a symbol of the structural-political evolution of the former mining region near Inden. This 36 meter high, accessible steel sculpture, built on a brown coal dump, resembles in its form a primitive robot. The Indemann gets its unique brightness from Illumesh® – a semitransparent skin made of stainless steel mesh with interwoven LED profiles by GKD – Gebrüder Kufferath AG. During the day, the metallic surface shimmers and reflects light, then at night a computer-controlled light show comes to life. The worldwide patented system is a cooperative product of GKD and ag4 media facade GmbH, Cologne. The Indemann is the first public project in Germany where Illumesh® is in use. After the spectacular dress rehearsal at the beginning of August, which attracted already over 2.500 spectators, the official inauguration of the steel colossus is on September 5th. The specially by ag4 developed and tailored show represents the transition of a changing cultural landscape and forms the basis for the atmospheric dense, smoothly shifting color and light patterns changes, as a symbol of the transformation from coal mining area towards a research-, educational and recreational region.

Honda Insight – Let It Shine from Honda on Vimeo.

by Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam

Walk around the place du Molard in Geneva, Switzerland, and you’ll be walking on stars. Two thousand LED light sources equipped with 10 000 white Power TOPLEDs have been set into the paving stones. As the sun begins to set, the LEDs begin to shine, giving the square a magical aura. When the Place du Molard was renovated, it was paved with cobble stones, identical to those which one already finds in the city center. Two thousand resin paving stones have been set in between, covering half a percent of the surface of the place. At nightfall the LED illuminated paving stones begin to shine, reproducing the shine and the silver-colored reflections of the Lake Geneva. The illuminated paving stones accumulate when approaching the lake and remind at the twinkling water, which penetrated up to this place in former times.

Inspired by the theme “The Green Man” architecture students Manuel Kretzer and Hans Sachs designed “The Cone”, an accessible dynamic structure. At night 700 LEDs from OSRAM Opto Semiconductors turned “The Cone” into a shining, rotating sculpture, visible from almost every point of the festival. The sculpture was built with two cones made of PVC-tubes, which were set on top of each other with the outer cone designed to rotate to create energy. The 8 meters high interior cone was mounted stationary on the platform and the 9 meters high exterior cone was fastened to the interior cone. Through the use of wind energy and human force the rotating sculpture produced energy for the nocturnal illumination.

The sculpture was illuminated by 700 green 5mm LEDs emitting light into the PVC-tubes. Reflectors were used to achieve the required narrow radiation. At night visitors to the interior of the sculpture could admire the fascinating effect of the overlap of the rod structures and the resulting continuous dance of shadow plays and light.

Twelve shimmering metal shafts rise at surprising angles from a grassy hill. They hang over the landscape, creating a graceful curve that appears to unfold for passing motorists. The shafts are part of Solar Collector, a sculpture created by artists Matt Gorbet, Rob Gorbet, and Susan LK Gorbet as a commission for the Region of Waterloo. Set in front of the Regional Operations Centre in Cambridge, Ontario, the sculpture is solar-powered and interactive, inviting the community to choreograph its nightly performance via the web.

fLUX, binary waves is an urban and cybernetic installation based on the measuring of infrastructural ( passengers, cars…) and communicational ( electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones, radio…) flows and their transposition into luminous, sonic and kinetic rules. This relation between the installation and the urban activity happens in real time and sets each person as an element of the installation, as a centre of the public realm.

This is an example of an ephemeral 3D Media Architecture only existing for a blink of time – on the occasion of the opening of the new Palm Jumeirah in Dubai; fits perfectly as a start into the new year: We wish a glamorous 2009 to all our readers and friends!