 | RADAREXHIBITION POSSIBLE WORLDS EXHIBITION
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Playspace by FXV seeks to reflect the
complex dynamics of children’s interactions
and to encourage the imagination.
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Work by NOX from the exhibition Possible Worlds.
Son-O-House, 2000–2004 in Son-En-Breugel,
The Netherlands, a collaboration with sound artist
Edwin van der Heide.
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H2O pavilion, 1994–1997,
Neeltje Jans, The Netherlands.
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Seoul Opera
House, 2005.
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Competition entry for the Jalisco
Library, Guadalajara, Mexico, 2005.
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Jules Moloney reviews the exhibition of work by Lars Spruybroek and John Bell – two different yet sophisticated responses to the potential offered by the computer.
The work of Dutch architect Lars
Spuybroek and Londoner John Bell, keynote
speakers at the Architecture Symposium for
the 2006 Adelaide festival, was exhibited at
the Louis Laybourne School of Architecture.
Entitled Possible Worlds: The Architecture
of Imagination, the exhibition would appear
to link these two quite distinct designers by
their innovative use of digital technology.
For both, the computer is more than “just a
tool”, a phrase often used by those educated
in the drawing board era to ring-fence the
computer. The computer may well be a tool,
but it is one that facilitates unprecedented
experimentation with geometry, surface and
the temporal aspects of architecture. In
addition, as evidenced by some of the work
on display, the anticipated hybrid of
architecture and information space is now a
realizable tangent for practice.
Lars Spuybroek’s practice NOX has an
international profile and will be well
known to some through the Australian
launch of his book Machining Architecture.
For Possible Worlds Spuybroek has chosen
projects that range from interactive
exhibition works to architectural proposals
at an urban scale.
The Freshwater Pavilion, commissioned
as a temporary exhibition space by the
Dutch Water Board, is both interactive and
large-scale. Close to 100 metres long, this
inflatable pavilion was embedded with
movement sensors that translate the
movement of visitors into light and image
projection, sound, water sprays and
physical deformation of surface. We are
presented here with an evocative view
showing the whale-esque inflatable draped
across the coastal landscape and a series of
small internal images. Given that the
strength of the work lies in the internal
experience, it is disappointing that there
was no audiovisual documentation of what
still stands as the largest experiment in
interactive architecture.
The D-tower, a permanent installation
commissioned by the city of Doetinchem in
the Netherlands, translates the idea of the
interactive to a permanent urban location.
The D-tower consists of three parts: a
website (accessible to everybody), a
questionnaire (accessible to a hundred
different people each year) and a
twelve-metre tower. All three parts are
interactively related to each other. The
tower is lit internally with a mix of red,
green and blue light. Updated each night,
the different colours map responses to the
questionnaires, which are intended to gauge
the mood of the town in relation to a variety
of issues. The D-tower establishes a direct
link between information and urban space,
an elegant and tangible interface that
operates both as physical monument and
social barometer.
The H2O pavilion and the D-tower are
flanked by NOX’s aspirations for
“blobitecture” at an urban scale and this is
where things get a tad scary. On display are
2x1.5-metre images of unrealized projects,
all conceived as a singular object stretched
and pulled to produce large-scale versions
of the geometry realized in the D-tower.
Unfortunately the shift in scale is, in most
cases, not accompanied by design at a finer
grain. One exception is the Jalisco Library
proposal (Mexico 2005), where the large
mass is broken down into fifteen-metre
bays, in which columns bifurcate and merge
in an engaging play of sinuous structure. On
closer inspection we read that the project is
part of research into the “gothic rules of
vitalized geometry”. Perhaps NOX are on to
something here, as the gothic has a mode of
composition in which the subtle interplay
between the detail and the whole address
the inherent problems of scaling up
singular forms.
Contrasting the large-scale approach of
NOX, in terms of both presentation and
content, the work of John Bell is presented
as A3 prints, supplemented by animations
projected onto an adjacent wall. Bell will be
an unknown entity to most here, but he is
building a reputation in London as an
inspirational unit master at the
Architectural Association and as a director
of the trans-disciplinary design consultancy
FXV Ltd. FXV are a niche practice who
have used their consummate digital
expertise to operate between media
displays, exhibition design and
architecture. The work on show is both
visually seductive and dense with text,
revealing an informed referencing of
post-structuralist theory, a nod to
influential cyberpunk such as Neal
Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and a gritty
political agenda. Bell’s writing on such
topics as the problems of originality, in
which he evokes the cybersurfer, “cutting
a laconic swath through the mare clausum
of the expected”, add intellectual resonance
to the memorable images.
The projects include the sophisticated
designs of showrooms for brands such as
Sony and Mercedes Benz, but it’s the series
of projects on children’s play spaces that
capture Bell’s wider agenda. Concerned
with the plummeting levels of play activity
among children, FXV have developed a
unique play-scape tuned to today’s
nine-year-old. They propose a landscape
embedded with pressure and motion
sensors, enabling the artificial terrain to
operate as an interface to sound and light.
This enables the invention of games such
as Irrigation, in which the objective is to
manipulate artificial water, sand and earth
to provide channels within the undulating
topography. In other areas the surface is
elastic and operates as a seamless
trampoline, the rhythm of multiple players
being mapped to sound to produce an
emergent back beat. The play spaces project
is a convincing imagined world, where the
physical and the electronic fuse with a
social purpose.
In the Possible Worlds exhibition one
can sense that both architects are working
towards a mature phase in their careers.
The use of computer-enabled geometry
and surface is central to their practice, as
is a shared interest in architecture beyond
static form. The computer is a sophisticated
and highly calibrated tool, and as such
requires sustained effort to master.
There are awkward moments in the work
on show, but the glimpses of Spuybroek’s
reinterpreted gothic and Bell’s socially
engaged hybrids offer imagined worlds of
high quality.
JULES MOLONEY IS A SENIOR LECTURER IN
DIGITAL ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE.
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