the largest color LED display worldwide, & the first photo-voltaic system integrated into a glass curtain wall in China. the display requires zero external energy, as the facade harvests solar energy by day & uses it to illuminate the screen after dark. the display comprises 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 polycrystalline photovoltaic cells are laminated within the glass of the curtain wall & 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 & transforming excessive solar radiation into energy for the media wall. you can play with the online simulator, or watch a movie after the break.[link: greenpix.org|via engadget.com] [posted on Information Aesthetics]

Upgrade! Berlin presents: Mader | Stublic | Wiermann :: April 25, 2008; 8 pm :: Redesign Deutschland, aka System Lüftung, Torstrasse 94 in Berlin-Mitte (U Rosenthaler Platz oder Rosa Luxemburg Platz).

Heike Wiermann, Holger Mader and Alexander Stublic focus on video art installations, media facades and art in the public sphere. Their latest projects cover for example the spectacular media facade design (”twists and turns”) of the Uniqua tower in Vienna, where they have managed to transform the structure of the architecture into an ever-changing, fluid state of transition. Furthermore, they co-initiated OSRAM’s new light platform Seven Screens, which they launched with their LED-piece Reprojected. This installation focuses on the shadows of computer-simulated people. Continue reading

INTERArChTIVE has commissioned Mette Ramsgard Thomsen (School of Architecture and Design, University of Brighton) and Karin Bech to develop the interactive installation Slow Furl for the Architecture 08 festival in June at Lighthouse in Brighton. The proposal is to make a room size textile installation that acts and reacts on its inhabitation. The installation exists as a soft and pliable skin that lines the Lighthouse space. The skin shifts. As guests enter and move within the foyer, the skin moves imperceptibly at deep timeframes, creating new cavities and spaces, revealing slits and apertures. Continue reading

[Image: Operation Urban Terrain (OUT): 2004-6 by Anne Marie Schleiner] “Due to its marginal existence in relation to the oppressive reality of work, play is often regarded as fictitious. But the work of the Situationists is precisely the preparation of ludic possibilities to come.” Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play, Internationale Situationniste #1, June 1958)

In recent years, commentators on game culture and ludology have undertaken the task of analyzing and structuring play. Such work has been strongly influenced by the Dutch researcher Johan Huizinga’s 1938 study of play, Homo Ludens and Roger Callois’s later structuralist elaborations of Huizinga’s research. Continue reading

Fritz Haeg - Animal Estates :: April 16, 2008; 6:30 pm :: The Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute for Technology, 265 Massachusetts Ave 3rd Fl (N52-390), Cambridge MA.

The Center is pleased to host Fritz Haeg and his project Animal Estates. While at MIT, Haeg will give a talk on his work and, with the help of MIT students and artists, build one installment of Animal Estates, a new series of dwellings thoughtfully designed to welcome an animal back into the city. These environments are made for displaced wildlife or for animals that have been domesticated. Continue reading

“Aether Architecture is a design and architecture studio based in Budapest, Hungary, that is known at an international level for its innovative and conceptual approach to media architecture … In projects such as “Ping Genius Loci“ or “Wifi Camera”, the digital is used as a real architectonic instrument, with the idea of promoting a structural approach that allows the visualization of mediation spaces, between the real and the virtual, between the local and the global in terms of connection between single individuals. For Adam the urban and the virtual space represent a single unity in constant relation, an expanded environment that the architect has to necessarily confront.” Continue reading Aether Architecture: Real Spaces, Virtual Spaces by Marco Mancuso (English translation by Caterina Sartori), DigiMag.

Until May 3, 2008, Improbable Architectures is at Translations|Traduções, WARC Gallery, Toronto :: part of the 21st Images Festival.

Improbable Architectures deals with Second Life as a space without parallel in the material world. It is a project developed by Noema Gallery team for the exhibition Memory of the Future, produced by Itaú Cultural. In different terrains, we build improbable architectures: in suspension, transparent, without columns, using only liquid and aerial sources to compose original forms which allow to anyone to navigate in its interior and exterior spaces, crossing its walls and merging with its structures. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: The Vitruvian World by Michael Takeo Magruder, Drew Baker and David Steele [Part of the Mixed Realities exhibition, on view until April 15, 2008] - In the 1st century BC, Roman writer, architect and engineer Vitruvius codified specific building formulae based on the guiding principles of strength, utility and beauty. He believed that architecture was intrinsically linked to nature and was a human imitation of cosmic order. The most well-known interpretation of this postulate is the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci in which the male form is depicted in unity with the square and circle - representing material and spiritual existence respectively. Continue reading

Annual NSO Conference’ Nonlinear Fabrication: Strange Loops in the Product’s Lifecycle :: April 3-4, 2008 :: University of Pennsylvania. Program.

Though matter itself has always found its expressions through nonlinear organizations, architecture’s modes of intervention in the life of matter have been linear and willful. As architecture continues its age-old struggles against material realities, the future holds astonishing possibilities as we slowly discern the nuances of complex material organizations and cultivate new regimes of expression. Continue reading

Upgrade! Paris: Ministère de l’Architecture: Soliton by Société Réaliste :: March 28, 2008; 7 pm :: La Cantine numérique, 151 rue Montmartre, 75002 Paris (M° Grands Boulevards (8,9) or Bourse (3)).

MA: Soliton is a typological inquiry about Solitonism, commissioned by Ministère de l’Architecture. In this research, Ministère de l’Architecture has demanded to continue the work of some eminent physicists about non-linear waves, by proposing to extend the analysis of Solitons to the field of the politics of space, and more precisely for reading activities like design or the erection of buildings. Continue reading