Media Architecture Institute

The Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planing at The University of Sydney has recently installed a SmartSlab LED screen inside the window display facing the yard in front of the faculty building.

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.

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.

The FLARE system

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.

“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.