When I began to write a review of this project, Dynamic Performance of Nature by E/B Office, I had thoughts and questions swarming in my head about the emerging trend of interactive architecture. When I started to write these, I found the issue to much deeper than mere architecture. It is a cultural question. And I leave it up to the reader to formulate for themselves what that question is. One potential answer, offered by E/B Office, to this undefined question is
conceived upon the notion that sustainability for the 21st century should be crafted to evolve beyond conventional application of green techniques into something alive and integrated with the environment, conditioning the most sophisticated forms of creativity for the preservation of life.-E/B Office
Global sensors for wind, temperature, seismicity and other factors, feed data to 1,888 full-colour RGB LEDs which translate this into continuous photonic waves across the wall, displaying changing trends as they occur. The colour range of the wall reflects temperature, the speed of the colours’ flow across the wall is indicative of actual wind speed, and when an earthquake occurs, the lights arrange themselves into a distorted map of the world, showing epicentre and intensity.
It is calculated that this wall, constructed of recycled HDPE fins, saved around 3 tons of plastic from landfills. All 176 fins are unique, acting together with solar powered LEDs to form the sine-derived figure of the wall. This piece of permanent architectural media occupies 1300 sqft of vertical exhibition space situated on the ground floor of the Leonardo Museum of Art, Technology and Science in Salt Lake City, Utah. It acts as a ‘programmatic threshold between exhibit spaces’. I would add to this that it acts as a programmatic threshold spanning what we interact with and what we perceive.
In the words of the architects,
DPoN will invite curious inquisition as well as detached contemplation of the synthesis between light, material, space, and global environmental information in hopes that visitors can perceive an architecture that is alive, pulsing with live information, communicating something in its own language which is indelibly linked to the material, geometry, and form of the wall itself.
Dynamic Performance of Nature_Lighting Test
Dynamic Performance of Nature installation Concept
Photography courtesy of EB Office, The Leonardo, Peter Katz, and Noa Younse
Project Credit:
Data visualization designer : Noa Younse
Consulting engineer : Kyle Twitchell, Telyk Works
Lighting consultant : Ben Watson, Solus Inc.
Installation team : Haley Blanco, Thomas Candee, Shaun Salisbury, Florence Schmitt, Hayes Shair, Danny Thai