Product Lounge of Microsoft’s Briefing Center in Wallisellen, Switzerland. Designed by COASToffice. All photos: David Franck Photography

As interactive devices fill up more and more of our spaces, will architects design differently? Will they treat interiors the same or will a fresh approach be required?

It’s coming sooner than you think. Just recently the University of Washington reported that it could use a WiFi signal to recognize hand gestures made anywhere in a house, meaning you could control your household electronics with a flick of the wrist. We’re already seeing an explosion of sensors and touch surfaces (not to mention personal visual devices) coming to the market. Much like television supplanting radio and the fireplace, these devices may cause subtle but significant changes to how we use spaces. Consequently, will how you use your tablet and motion sensor drive how your home or office is designed?

So when we heard that Microsoft had recently completed a new Briefing Center in Switzerland replete with interactive Kinect and Surface products, our interest was certainly piqued. See what architects at COASToffice have designed for Microsoft after the jump!

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Photos: Kollision

It’s a tried and true equation: floorplates plus an interesting facade can provide architectural gold even in the most trying of circumstances. The newest site for putting this idea to the test is downtown Copenhagen, where a reconstruction and revamping of the Confederation of Danish Industry building places a vibrant digital screen across the street from the City Hall and next to the entrance to Tivoli Gardens.

The project, a collaboration between Transform, Martin Professional, and Kollision, involved close collaboration between city officials and the design team in order to create a better fit with its urban surroundings. The screen, fully programmable, changes along its diagonal grid, alternating between vibrant rainbow graphics, numbered displays (presumably of date and time), and abstract linework.

The effect is surprisingly elegant, the designers somehow managing to reconcile contextuality and bombast. Robert Venturi, though, would still call it a decorated shed. More photos after the jump!

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Projection in Brooklyn. Image: Dumbo Arts Center

Text messages inhabit a strange duality: on the one hand, they are now one of the most prevalent forms of communication in the urban setting, and on the other, they are meant for the eyes of the sender and receiver only. Any threat to the privacy of digital word is seen as an invasion of the mind; why else do we tilt our phones away from view when on public transportation? This privacy also allows text messages to be uninhibited—some would say too much so. But what happens when texting becomes a public act?

Image: Paul Notzold

New York-based artist Paul Notzold explored this with ‘TXTual Healing,’ a travelling interactive urban installation recently stationed in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, as part of Wooster Collective’s Sheboygan Project. It works thus: text bubble frames are projected onto walls along with images. Passersby send text messages to a projected number, and these messages are then cycled through the text bubbles. The result is a spectacle in which one tries to guess who in the crowd sent what, and contradictory thoughts are juxtaposed in physical space. Since there is no filter on the content, some messages may get obscene or raunchy, and yet the overall tone of the installation tends to be positive.

Image: The Lo-Down

It is also interesting to note how the content of the messages changes depending on its urban context: there are the obvious changes in language, but also in length and verve. It seems, however, that humor is a universal. Perhaps the most exciting outcome is simply the interaction between the digital world and the physical world; what was once communicated between two people becomes communicated to a multitude, and the very act of communication changes the physical environment through the mechanism of light.

Projection in Munich. Image: Paul Notzold

Project in Sheboygan. Image: Wooster Collective

Projection in Milan. Image: Paul Notzold

Projection in New York. Image: Paul Notzold

Projection in San Francisco. Image: Paul Notzold

Projection in Amsterdam. Image: Paul Notzold

[via designboom]

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Images of FLOAT Beijing by FLOAT

Air quality in China is notoriously poor, with visibility often shrinking to nothing, and combated with the ubiquitous donning of the surgical face mask. The government has sought ways to control information about urban pollution, with the deputy minister of Environmental Protection scolding the U.S. Embassy for its practice of tweeting air quality data hourly. Seeking a way to circumvent the data blockade, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard students Deren Guler and Xiaowei Wang are putting air quality measurement technologies in the peoples’ hands.

GOOD looks into the project, FLOAT Beijing, that makes innovative use of an ancient technology and long-time recreational instrument–kites. Each kite is equipped with a sensor, which then glows with different colors based on certain air quality metrics. Employed en masse, the kites will create a spectral flotilla in Beijing’s night sky – if you can see them through the smog, that is. The project recently started a Kickstarter page, and has already received several grants, in part, due to its DIY and grassroots aspects: each participant in the project will make their own kite by hand. Continue.

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When the Philips Pavilion was opened at the Brussels World Fair in 1958, Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis, along with Edgar Varese, introduced a mode of spatial production in which the arts and the built environment were synthesized in a way that had never been seen up until that time. Though the pavilion stood only for a season, it remains to this day a testament to the historical moment in which architecture began to expand its interests and pursuits beyond the founding Greco-Roman truisms that had dictated the parameters of the field for so long. In addition to these and other salient points that can be made for the work’s influence–among which the corporate sponsorship (and manufacturing) of art and cultural objects that built it cannot be ignored–the pavilion also gave birth, somewhat indirectly, to the technological light show. Xenakis’ later installations and experiments would expound on the initial propositions advanced by the Philips Pavilion, while increased computing power and readily accessible 3d-modeling and scripting sets, not too mention the open-sourced mentality of contemporary digital culture have accelerated the development of dynamic, interactive light shows. Which is what we get a whole lot of nowadays, from urban pinball games to psychedelic cathedrals.

“Augmented Structures v1.1: Acoustic Formations / İstiklâl Caddesi” by Salon 2 is the latest of these “interactive architectures.” The 400m2 architectural installation premiered in İstanbul last fall, hypnotizing visitors with a 6-minute dance of light and form. The piece can be described as a negotiation between the virtual medium of mathematically-generated visuals and the architectonic tradition.  A large undulating frame was mounted on the façade of a public building at Galatasaray Square and served as the “canvas” on which the fluid-like graphics–which feature references to the triangulated surfaces of the Rhino age–unfold, bend, and mutate. According to the makers, the project “forces each discipline to alter its own ‘material’ state; transforming sound into mathematics, mathematics into architecture and architecture into a living canvas, while presenting the viewer with a new media experience that is multi-levelled, produces sound, moves and breathes.”

Image: Salon 2

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First the streets of Paris (at least in Inception), now the facades of Lyon. In December, the Théatre des Celestins was the location of an unlikely phenomenon in the architecture world: a classical Beaux-Arts building smushed into a Gehry-esque blob. And all thanks to the vocal patterns of a very captive audience.

1024 Architecture, the duo who invented the oral video-mapping, first concentrated on simple but effective theatrical lighting . They described their installation Perspective Lyrique as focusing on “the interaction between body, space, sound, visual, low-tech and hi-tech, art and architecture.” According to Co.Design, the architects “created a custom program that would analyze the tones in an audience-member’s voice and then mathematically apply it as a deformation to the image in real time.”

Sounds vague, but watch the video and prepare to have your mind blown.

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