Edited by Alessandro Premier

Screencity Journal

2 / 2013

COLOUR ENVIRONMENT INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Edited by Alessandro Premier

INDEX Editorial – S. Arcagni, M. De Rosa Colour, Environment, Interactive Media: A Short Presentation – A. Premier Topic 1 / Colour Stilled in the City by Coloured Light – J. Rennie Black Colour in Architecture and Built Environment – J. Tarajko-Kowalska Crystal in Architecture – V. Brustolon, R. De Monte

Topic 2 / Environment Wang Shu. Architectural Facades as Textural and Tactile Stratification – G. Scavuzzo Black and White Screen the City: Contessa di Parma Becomes Smart – O. Castiglione Photosensitive Architecture. The Luminous Landscapes of Computers and Screens – A. Barbara Maxxi TV. A Public Media Art that Interfaces with the Architecture of the Museum – A. Ladaga, S. Manteiga

Topic 3 / Interactive Media Aequilibrium. Location Based Entertainment and Transmedia for Cultural Heritage – G. Bertone, D. Morreale Elastic Systems for Compliant Shading Enclosures. Dynamic Façade System with Innovative Textile Materials – C. Gregoris “Techno-Poetry” within Zedekiah’s Cave – A. Martini

EDITORIAL – SCREENCITY JOURNAL ISSUE #2 SIMONE ARCAGNI, MIRIAM DE ROSA Screencity Journal Directors

After the warm welcome received by issue 1, Screencity Journal launches its second volume which represents the elaboration of many comments, suggestions and observations gathered from very numerous, stimulating and generous readers. Screencity editorial staf tried to take on the challenge of ofering an updated, high quality and scientifcally rigorous publication, preserving and fostering its original aims – namely, provide a specifc though interdisciplinary insight about the fascinating relationship between contemporary urban environment, new technologies and media. Such an efort mirrors the progressive development of the whole Screencity project, refecting therefore the articulation of its internal structure: from summer 2013 Screencity enhanced its two-fold vocation toward academia on the one hand, and feld application on the other. Screencity Journal plays a crucial role as far as the former is concerned, while the brand new Screencity Lab association intends to bring to completion a 360-degree intervention in more practical terms. Tus, Screencity Journal’s renovated organization resembles the fruitful synergy between practice and theoretical speculation; from this second issue on, project analysis, technical overviews, as well as critical and creative articles collected in the Journal undergo a double blind peer review process that homologates the publication to the highest national and international standards in the feld. Such changes do not only represent technical and internal procedures, but they are rather meant to be the founding principles of a professional and ethical framework, which characterizes Screencity project. Tey are shared here with everyone who has accepted to be part of it as author, Advisory Board member, and referee, in the hope they would also be appreciated by our readers.

COLOUR, ENVIRONMENT, INTERACTIVE MEDIA: A SHORT PRESENTATION ALESSANDRO PREMIER University of Udine [email protected]

Abstract

Screencity Journal #2 ofers a series of arguments from diferent disciplines but thickly intertwined. Te title of this issue contains the three main topics around which was launched in July 2013, the call for papers: Colour, Environment, Interactive Media. Te three main topics give to the authors a very wide space for action within which they can merge contributions from diferent disciplines: architecture, design, art, sociology, communication and so on. Te fnal result is a journal in which you may fnd scientifc articles on colour in architecture: design, efects, interpretations, new technologies (Tarajko-Kowalska, Rennie, Brustolon-D e Monte); interventions of architecture and art and their relationships with the surrounding environment or the contemporary city (Scavuzzo, Castiglione, Barbara, Elastic Group) , media architecture, interactive installations and Alternate Reality Game (Gregoris, Martini, BertoneMorreale).

Keywords

Colour, Environment, Interactive Media

Screencity Journal #2: an introduction Screencity Journal #2 is structured in three sections, each one dedicated to one of the three topics under the call for papers: colour, environment and interactive media. Te topic "Colour" is extended to a wide range of scientifc areas: visual culture; photography; industrial design; lighting design; interior design; architecture; urbanism; landscaping; colour in computer vision; colour in graphic design; multimedia in colour imaging; colour perception; colour science. A specifc subject is expected, the result of a research with colour as a tool of analysis or critical reading. Te topic "Environment" is dedicated to contributions of studies or projects (artistic, technological, etc..) and their relationships with the surrounding environment: performance; art; museography; scenography; built environment, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality, materiality, texture, surface; transparency and translucency, refection and glossiness, social media and space, screencity. Te topic "Interactive media" includes projects and researches on interactive communication in the context of: static and electronic media; multimedia; illusions resulting through light and colour interaction, virtual projects, media façade, media studies, visual studies, screen media, locative media, interaction media.

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Colour “Te chief function of colour should be to serve expression” (Henri Matisse) As well known, colour is one of the fundamental aspects in the perception of the world around. Colour can also have a strong infuence on our psyche, infuencing our mood and our behaviour. Te frst paper of this section deals with a particular issue related to the use of colour in architecture and built environment: how coloured light can let you take a break in the fast-paced contemporary city? With the paper “Stilled in the city by coloured light” Julian Rennie explores, through the work and thought of artists, architects and writers, how coloured light might activate “being still” for a time in our contemporary life. At the centre of the paper there is Futuna Chapel, an example of Modern architecture built in 1961 in Wellington city’s suburb of Karori, New Zealand. A series of examples of places of peace and tranquillity where colour has a central role (works of Barragan and James Turrel for example) seem to demonstrate how through colour and light you could fnd a refuge. So, why not use the deconsecrated chapel as a “coloured light-retreat?” Te answer given by the author is articulated through the fascinating description of the use of coloured light in the chapel and the efects created by the artist Jim Allen. As we may understand, reading for example a book by Michel Pastoureau, colour is also a great tool for understanding many aspects of our culture and our history and to understand features of our contemporary life. Te paper of Justyna Tarajko-Kowalska deals with the use of black colour in architecture and built environment. Te author describes the diferent meanings and uses of black colour in diferent cultures and diferent periods. It is a fascinating journey through the cultures and architectures of diferent peoples: the ancient world of Greek and Romans; the Far East cultures of Japan, China and the Arab World; the rural buildings of Europe and America; Twentieth century’s Modernism till contemporary architectural environment with recent surface materials and technologies. “Black has become the colour of the current era, creation, power, and money – dominating not only the worlds of designers, fashion designers, or architects, but also those of lawyers and bankers” (Pastoreau: 2008). Te perception of colour is very important also when we are talking about transparent and translucent materials: glass and crystal, especially when they are produced in particular shapes and with the integration of light systems. Transparent and translucent materials are often associated with the contemporary trend in art and architecture that aims to dematerialize the shapes of an artefact, creating vibrating surfaces. Tere are changing and iridescent refections in that surfaces that are able to make fuid and elusive even more squared shapes. Te paper by Veronica Brustolon and Roberta De Monte deals with this subject: “Crystal in Architecture”. Te authors explore the world of Lasvit’s creations made with Bohemian crystal. Te article focuses particularly on the very recent creations by Ross Lovegrove for the brand. Creations in which light interacts with a crystal produced by new processes capable of giving the surface a liquid aspect that draws the liquid modernity theorized by Zygmunt Bauman (Bauman: 2000).

Environment “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected” (Steve Jobs) “From the spoon to the town” said Max Bill talking about the architectural profession (Bill: 1957): environment is therefore the more general case where colour, surfaces and textures create diferent forms of expression. Te screen-city is probably one of the places where the current capitalist society fnds its most 2

suitable forms of expression (Zennaro: 2009). But there are also experiences of contrast to this reality. Experiences that start from diferent assumptions, often linked to a more or less foggy concept of sustainability, sometimes getting results consistent with their thoughts, sometimes in contradiction. Te paper by Giuseppina Scavuzzo explores the current trend of an architecture that is opposed to globalization by taking refuge in a reinterpretation of tradition. In this particular case the reinterpretation of the past is expressed especially in the use of materials and textures of rural buildings. Other contemporary intellectuals like Vittorio Gregotti think that this “fght” against globalization would better express through critical realism, a sort of return to the rational lines of a certain Modernism (Gregotti: 2012). Te author starts from the assumption that the immateriality of the architecture of globalization “is expressed frst in the digital prefguration of architecture and then in the aspiration to maintain this virtual character in the actual construction by using technologies that tend to dematerialise buildings […] (even) turning the facades into screens for virtual images” (Scavuzzo). As opposed to the commercial spirit of certain creations, the author believe there is a new way for architecture that aspire “not only in the focus on sustainability and energy saving, to which high-tech projects must also aspire, but also in a cultural and spiritual need to establish a bond, albeit visceral, with nature and the earth” (Scavuzzo). Tis new way is well represented by the work of the Chinese architect Wang Shu. Art and media such as cinema and literature have often predicted scenarios that would actually materialize in the future. A diferent way to deal with the concept of “environment” seems to be represented in the paper by Ornella Castiglione who focuses her attention on a historical example of a medium that seems to anticipate some aspects of the contemporary screencity. In fact, the author argues that a number of issues of the contemporary debate about media and city had already been introduced in a flm of the Tirties of the Twentieth Century: Contessa di Parma by Alessandro Blasetti. “ I n Contessa di Parma the vision is often realized through screens, mirrors or glasses in function of diaphragms between gaze and fction, truth and deception […] Te staged spectacle inside the movie is the big city made by screens and by technological and audiovisual spectacle that we use to stare in our digital era. Always more close to an entertainment park or a multiplex” (Castiglione, in this issue). Urban screens and screens in their broadest sense have certainly brought signifcant changes into our lives. Te contribution of Anna Barbara deals exactly with this topic. Te paper starts from the innovations introduced in architecture by the urban screens, arguing that once the facade was the refection of the building layout but now it is completely independent of it. Te “end-user” of these new scenarios is no longer the viewer of the twentieth century: “the observer of the fourth dimension (time) in the XXI century is not only passive spectator but he takes part to the large projection in urban scenarios, being himself sometimes protagonist or manipulator of the show” (Anna Barbara). Te variable of time becomes extremely important in the cities of urban screens. Even the TV screens in the course of the twentieth century have changed the habits of the families, the use and perception of the interior spaces of homes. Artifcial light that characterizes our nocturnal spaces has altered the circadian rhythms of our lives. “Te main places that reveals an interesting relationship between screens (computer, TV, etc.) and spaces are: the ofces and workplaces 2.0 and the places of waiting or passages (mentioning Walter Benjamin's passages)” (Anna Barbara). Te screen-city fnds its highest moments when art and culture are combined with the new means of communication. Te thought, conveyed through images on a large scale, can change the perception of a place and, at the same time, make us better understand the sense or the non-sense of the place itself. Te paper by Alexandro Ladaga and Silvia Manteiga (Elastic Group of Artistic Research) deals with MAXXI TV - the giant eye of the TV - a Project of Public Art that Elastic Group has 3

“planned for the MAXXI – National Museum of the XXI Century Arts in Rome 2% Public Art Contest. In this project, the giant eye of the TV generates a variable and multiple, elastic space. MAXXI TV is a Public Media Art that interfaces with the architecture of the Museum designed by Zaha Hadid. […] A Public Art that observes the public and the museum, a large electronic eye that absorbs architecture” (Ladaga, Manteiga, in this issue). Te article focuses on how the environment and the museum itself are modifed by the presence of the giant eye of the TV. As it seems, the only place for a piece of art in a museum, that is a sculpture itself, is the outside. In fact, as the authors say, “the project MAXXI TV is planned as an expansion of the museum as it may temporarily house video festivals and exhibitions of media art and architecture” (Ladaga, Manteiga).

Interactive media “Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone” ( Jaron Lanier) “Te medium is the message”, said Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan: 1964). In the interactive games and in the interactive artistic creations the message can exceed the instrument itself and become a vehicle of information and culture, sometimes only instilling in the user an interest that he can develop on their own. Te paper by Giulia Bertone and Domenico Morreale is focused on the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) “Aequilibrium - Te last guardian of Leonardo”. An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is a game that connects the Internet to the real world. It usually develops through numerous web tools (blogs, e-mail, web sites), and presents the player a history of mysterious clues that point to the real world (for example, monuments or real objects hidden in certain locations). “Te ARG Aequilibrium - Te Last Guardian of Leonardo experiments transmedia and geocaching in the feld of cultural heritage. With the playful practice of geocaching, Aequilibrium promotes connections between the fctional world and the real one, giving participants the chance to discover cultural, social and historical values embedded in the Lomellina landscape. Te article presented the Aequilibrium’s design process, as well as the communication and interaction strategies for digital engagement in new hyper mediated habitats, focusing on how the game encourages participation in the storytelling, through cultural activators able to foster collective intelligence and grassroots production” (Bertone, Morreale, in this issue). Te contemporary architectural surfaces are more and more capable of interacting with the surrounding environment, at various levels. Te paper by Chiara Gregoris focuses its attention on new textile surfaces able to interact with the external environment so as to automatically adjust natural light or temperature inside the buildings. Tese particular technologies are able to redesign the skin of the buildings often transformed into a vehicle of messages. Te contribution by Anna Martini starts with a recent creation of the artist Dan Roosegaarde, the Lotus Dome, to expand its attention to smart materials and smart technologies for the creation of architectural surfaces. “Lotus Dome is a huge hemisphere set inside one of the biggest cave of Jerusalem. Creating a play of light and shadow on the cave’s surface, it looks like a big breathing bunch of fowers whose petals close when nobody get closer to it” (Anna Martini). Lotus Dome is an interactive object made of smart memory alloy petals able to move thanks to the artifcial light, which is put into action by the movement of people. 4

Tis particular interactive technology is part of a wider complex of researches on the most recent surface technologies able to realize interactive, dynamic, adaptive or adaptable architectural skins in order to improve the performance of buildings through highly expressive expedients.

Conclusions

A reading of the various contributions of Screencity Journal # 2 seems to indicate quite clearly that the many aspects that afect the screen-city are all strongly connected with each other. Even the forms of artistic expression that seem in confict with it, however, start with a thought that is generated by observing the way to communicate that seems to dominate our contemporary society. Te environment in which we live inevitably afects us, but each one of us can choose one or more ways to direct their own researches, their own interests. Unlike certain sectors of academia that seems to move towards a single thought, Screencity Journal #2 ofers a wide range of viewpoints, even diferent, on the contemporary environment, each of which deserves to be deepened with a careful reading. Design the forms of time, and not only the forms of space, acquiring those new tools and scenarios that media technologies make increasingly available, it will be a mandatory task.

Bibliography Bauman, Z., (2000), Liquid Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Bill, M., (1957), Die Gute Form, Winterthur: Buchdruckerei (tr. eng., (2001), Good Design: An exhibition by Max Bill, 1949, Baden: Lars Muller). Flam, J., (ed.), (1995), Matisse on Art, Berkeley: University of California Press Gasparini, K., (2012), Schermi urbani, Milan: Wolters Kluwer. Gregotti, V., (2012), Incertezze e simulazioni. Architettura tra moderno e contemporaneo, Milan: Skira Lanier, J., (1998), “Taking stock. So, what’s changed in the last fve years?”, Wired, January, pp. 60-62. McLuhan, M., (1964), Understanding Media: Te Extensions of Man, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pastoureau, M., (2008), Black: Te History of a Color, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Young, J. S., (1988), Steve Jobs: Te Journey is the Reward, New York: Lynx Books. Zennaro, P., (2009), Architettura senza, Milan: Franco Angeli.

Biography Alessandro Premier, editor of Screencity Journal #2, is architect and PhD in Architectural Technology. He teaches Design and Building Technology at IUAV University of Venice and he is adjunct professor at the University of Udine, master degree in Architecture. His researches are focused on the architectural and technological integration of static and dynamic surfaces for the environmental quality of buildings. He is author of books, articles and essays published, for example, by Utet Scienze Tecniche, Franco Angeli and Maggioli.

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STILLED IN THE CITY BY COLOURED LIGHT JULIAN RENNIE Department of Architecture, Unitec

Abstract

Does coloured light still have the power to silence us? In the current urban world of social media and 30-second sound bites, do we have any retreats from our “uba-paced” lifestyle? Is there time and are there places where we can pause and take stock? Church architecture of the medieval period made use of coloured, (stained), glass helped to create an atmosphere that religion claimed as appropriate to worship. With the decline of religion what is to be done with such spaces? 19.03.2011 would have marked the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Futuna Chapel, (in Wellington city’s suburb: Karori), New Zealand. Events however overtook the chapel, in 2000 the Fellowship of Brothers who had commissioned it, deconsecrated the chapel due to a falling membership. Tey sold the whole site to developers, and Futuna now fnds itself surrounded by 90 housing units. “Te Friends of Futuna Charitable Trust” has since purchased Futuna and is currently raising funds to restore the building. However, the question remains: what use can a such restored building be put to, given that it is no longer a religious space? Tis paper explores the ideas of writers such as Maitland who “loves Silence;” Ehm and Löfgren who adore “doing nothing;” together with artists such as Turrell who works directly with light; colourist architects such as Barragan who sometimes detailed “paint on glass,” amongst others in an attempt to explore how coloured light might activate “being still” for a time in the city.

Keywords

Coloured Light, Futuna Chapel, Silence

Introduction Today we like to recycle, reuse, and, (in this case), reinvent, to stretch our limited resources. It would be easy to treat a space regardless of its past history as nothing more than a mere shelter, by renovating and occupying it. A greater challenge would be to honour a building’s history and purpose in a meaningful and ongoing way. It is the intention of this paper to discuss and show how this could be done. Tis paper’s case study is Te Futuna Chapel, at 62 Friend Street, in Karori, Wellington, New Zealand. It was commissioned by the Brothers of the Society of Mary to commemorate “the martyrdom of St Peter Chanel on the French Polynesian Island of Futuna, in the Pacifc, (28 April 1841),” (Walden: 1987, p.15). Te Chapel was designed by the New Zealand Maori Architect: John Scott. Te “glass” windows were designed by artist: Jim Allen. Consecrated and opened on the 19 th of March 1961, this Chapel functioned as a religious retreat until it was “deconsecrated around the time the Brothers sold to the developer in 1999,” (Bevin: 2010). Te Futuna Chapel may not be that well known beyond Australasia, but is highly revered within local architectural circles, receiving a NZIA, (New Zealand Institute of Architects), Gold Medal in 1968, and also a NZIA 25 Year Award in 1986 which confrms its enduring merit within the community. 1

Tis paper’s idea is to investigate some of the central themes of the chapel: the coloured light and the stillness of such a scared space. To show through precedence, via writings of various authors, artists and architects how this deconsecrated chapel could be used as a “coloured light-retreat.” It would be a place and space for people regardless of their beliefs or non-beliefs, to savour the delights of coloured light for its own sake.

Fig. 1. Coloured Light: Futuna

Fig. 5. Coloured Light: Futuna

Fig. 2. Stations of the Cross: Futuna

Fig. 4. Coloured Light: Futuna

Fig. 3. Bench seating, (2010): Futuna

Fig. 6. Coloured Light: Futuna

Precedence Te interest in natural light, and allowing lots of it into built interiors, was one of the foundations of Modern Architecture. Te use of clear foat glass with its transparency, as a way of linking the inside to the outside epitomised what a “modern” space was. But what of coloured light? In Chapter 106 of Glasarchitektur by Paul Scheerbart, (frst published in 1914), exclaims: “More coloured light!...We must not strive to increase the intensity of light – today it is already too strong and no longer endurable. But gentler light is worth striving for. Not more light! – ‘more coloured light!’ must be the watchword,” (Scheerbart: 1972, p. 72). Tese words could still apply today where too much glass has made for mundane spaces, (such as glass ofce buildings), which tend to overheat, (due to the lack of shading), and often rely on nature to be viewed as though a precious jewel like pavilion in a feld. “Scheerbart [also] published Der Lichtklub von Batavia:Eine damen-Novellette (Te Light Club of Batavia: A Ladies Novelette) in 1912. It is a little known text; the tale is rarely included in bibliographies of Scheerbart’s collected works,” (McElheny: 2010, p. 3). Te gist of this short tale is about a proposal by a patroness who wants to build a spa at the bottom of a mineshaft, not for bathing in water but for bathing in light! M any of 2

Scheerbart’s ideas related to glass from 1914 have been correctly forecast such as: “double walls of glass,” which we now know as double-glazing, and “glass fbres,” which became fbreglass. Maybe his “bathing in light” could be another? So why not have “more coloured light?” Looking back at the history of coloured light, one associates the idea with stained glass in windows of religious chapels, churches and cathedrals. On a visit to Saint-Chapelle in Paris, (14.09.1988), the author has stood back and watched peoples’ reactions to the blaze of coloured light that literally hits the visitor, as they came up the tight curving staircase, (from the Chapelle Basse below), into the Chapelle Haute. Teir mouths dropped open in awe, their breath seemed taken away, at the experiencing of the overwhelming afect of the Chapel’s coloured light fooding in over them. Often such stained glass is overlaid with religious iconography. However, it could be argued that these literal images, (especially in cathedrals), are often too far away to be seen clearly by the naked eye to put the efect down to recognition of religious motifs. So it seems, there is some sort of experiential phenomena at play. Te direct “assault” on our sense of sight triggers a reaction in our brains to such coloured light, seemingly independent of religious belief. Te resulting “coloured light splashes” seem to afect us in a primal or fundamental way. One person who experimented with coloured light was Mexican artist: Jesus “Chucho” Reyes Ferreira, (18801977); he built himself a “yellow” living room where “the glass was painted yellow so that the room is washed with yellow light, giving the efect of sunshine. [Tis] idea…resurfaced later in the houses of [Luis] Barragan,” (Street-Porter, 1989, 144). Such an example being: the hallway of the Gilardi House, (1978), which has the frosted glass paned slots painted with yellow pointillist paint splodges, resulting in a “spacelight.” And, as Saito describes the experience: “[the light], dyes the white wall and ceiling…so that passing through it becomes a surrealistic dream-walk… the yellow corridor, the very air of which is tinged with particles of golden light, functions as a type of space converter. As you walk down this long tunnel through the shower of golden light, you can feel your mood change. No architect has explored the efect of colour on space and the human psyche to the extent that Barragan has.” (Saito: 2002, pp. 195-197 and 31). Another explorer of coloured light as pure form, is the artist James Turrell, who says: “I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some way gather it, or seem to hold it. So in that way it’s a little like Plato’s cave. We sit in the cave with our backs to reality, looking at the refection of reality on the cave wall,” (Turrell: 2006, pp. 26-27). In his so-called “Skyspaces,” Turrell merely builds a seat for the viewer, as though inviting the viewer to stop, to be seated for a while, and let the overhead phenomena wash over the viewer. (As noted by the author during my visit to the “Skyspace,” at the De Young Museum, San Francisco, (31.05.2010)). Furthermore, within Turrell’s: Live Oak Friends Meeting House in Houston, Texas, (2000), which was commissioned by the local Quakers, there are bench like seats gathered around and under the “Skywindow,” profering the same invitation to pause and refect on the sky’s, coloured, light. By way of a living example of how a space can be transformed just by light: the author has over the years frequented Sir John’s Soane’s own house, (now a museum of itself ), at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, however on a recent evening tour, (22 November 2011), the afect is rather magical due to the whole house being lit by candles alone, the silence and whispered voices of the visitors, (who had queued for hours outside), was at marked contrast of a daytime visit with tourists chattering as they shufe through the complex of tiny rooms. Quakers are renowned for their “meeting[s] in which any words emerge from silence.” (Maitland: 2009, p. 141). Sara Maitland, in her book entitled: A Book of Silence, describes the phenomena associated with her various deliberate immersions into diferent “silent” environs, and she says: “I am convinced that as a whole society we are losing something precious in our increasingly silence-avoiding culture and that somehow, whatever this silence might be, it needs holding, nourishing and unpacking,” (Maitland: 2009, p. 32). Contrast this with the overloading of “visual noise” we put up with our daily contact within various cyberworlds, which we increasingly have to inhabit, (for example, on-line shopping and on-line social networking). Busch argues that in fact we need real experiences that revolve around tactility to counter those other virtual 3

activities in equal and opposite measure, to partake in such “tangible experiences…[it is essential to] demand we use our abilities to see, smell, hold and touch in a real and visceral way[s],” (Busch: 2004, p. 4). One of the few non-ecumenical “chapels” built is Te Rothko Chapel, in Houston, Texas, (1971), which displays 14No. of Mark Rothko’s paintings mounted around the walls of the octagonal plan. (NB. the author found himself willingly staying for a half day during a visit on 24.07.1986). Despite varying opinions of its success, the “chapel” continues to draw people as a place of tranquillity. A recent check of the YELP website, (which claims: “real people, real reviews”), shows 87 reviews, of which: 33No. were 5-star rated, and 20No. were 4-star rated. Although this is hardly scientifc research it however makes the point. One women, Cara D. from Houston, commenting: “It is a place to mediate, to think, to pray, to use however you wish – so long as you are not disturbing other dwellers, of course…I visited here with a friend from Chicago…and once we were outside she exclaimed: ‘If only every city could have a place like this.’ ” (YELP: 2013).

Discussion Te above texts seem to support this paper’s main proposal: “Why not use this deconsecrated chapel, Futuna, as a “coloured light-retreat?” A refuge that can be enjoyed for its peacefulness, within a busy suburb. A space open during sunlight hours, for all-comers. A space to take rest in silence and watch the coloured light fall within the “lightspace”. Compare this to what has happened to various Churches and chapels within New Zealand, some have been reused as houses or bingo halls. Tese reinventions may be practical but often show respect little of the original “being” of the building. A question might be posed: “Are images essential to our wellbeing?” If one considers the 29 coloured photographic images of Gavin Woodward’s in Waldren’s 1987 book, these astounding images leave the reader in no doubt as to the palpable atmosphere that light can generate within what was once a small chapel. Author: Tim Parks in his book Teach us to sit Still interestingly notes, “over the period when I wasn’t well…I found myself spending more and wore time looking at images…images of any kind…seemed to ofer relief from the language driven anxieties inside my head,” (Parks: 2010, p. vii). Te inference being: could a space activated by natural light provide such images that evoke some stillness, (in our minds), to those requiring a refuge from our daily worries, stresses and strains? In the book Te Secret World of Doing Nothing, (2010), its authors: Ehm and Löfgren, discuss at great length the rather delicious aspect of our lives where we supposedly are “doing nothing” (Ehm and Löfgren: 2010, p. 6). Tey discuss in detail what we actually do when we are “waiting,” the nuances of “routine,” and our “daydreamings,” all which they consider are essential for serious study in comparison to those writings related to “doing something,” (work, play, etc). Te authors argue that such times of “doing nothing” are of full signifcance to each individual and are of great importance to our overall wellbeing. To give some idea of the powerful afect the coloured light had in the original chapel: “Jim Allen described this event vividly: ‘You can imagine the very frst time we saw it – I think it was John that saw it frst. He came running in – as we were in another building – come on, come on, and have a look at this. We all ran across to the chapel – the yellow and blood-red light was on the wall – the most amazing thing, because for the next hour there were people standing there in silence – just watching the light… And it was the frst time it had been seen’,” (Walden: 1987, p. 122). And still more recently: the author attended a Futuna fundraising lecture, (11.08.2010, in Auckland, New Zealand), presented by Architect: Nick Bevin, (current chair of the “Te Friends of Futuna Charitable Trust”). Before getting to the digital slides of the coloured light, (which were actually Gavin Woodward’s beautiful images), Nick rather poignantly told the audience, “he was going to stop talking, while he showed the next images,” Te silence was palpable, as about 50 design professionals stood stock still, (no sipping of wine or chatter), while the coloured light images, (similar to fgures 1 to 6, below), worked their magic. 4

In terms of the detail of how the coloured light is “generated” with Futuna, the coloured light windows have many squares that are actually made of perspex, set into black painted aluminium “H” sections for support, (as opposed to stained glass with lead canes). Te creator of this system, artist: Jim Allen was “interested in a foating atmosphere of colour…[and he was looking for a way that] the hue of the colour could be intensifed…he learned that if he isolated colour by embedding it in black, the colour became far more intense. He also learned the value of having small panes of clear [perspex] which could focus light and make it fash, like sun refecting of a car window,” (Walden: 1987, pp. 86-87). Tis gives the amazing coloured light splashes that rain down within the “retreat.” Tese perspex squares are also devoid of religious iconographic images, they are made up of abstract groupings of primary colours: red, blue and yellow squares, which sometimes combine to create secondary colours of purples, greens, and oranges. Tese colours can be savoured in their own right, with no religious overtones, just colour, (e.g Fig.1). Te original bench seating, has been recently reinstated without the kneelers, thus removing the cue to worship and further freeing the space’s use, (e.g Fig.3), encouraging simply sitting and being “in the moment”. Te Stations of the Cross, which were also done by Jim Allen, were carved out of cast plaster and backlit by perspex covered electric lights. Why couldn’t switching the back-lights of, or installing a dimmer device downplay such icons? (e.g Fig.2). For approximately 12 years, (the period 2000-2012), Jim Allen’s original carved timber Crucifxion went missing from the chapel, (the crown of thorns and the crucifxion “nails” remain missing at the time of writing). Although the “Christ’s” return has been hailed as a triumph of community awareness and police perseverance, and indeed this Christ fgure was justly central to the original space when it was a chapel. Te question remains: “in losing this icon did the space really lose something?” Tis is contentious of course with difering opinions in relation to religious belief. But, has the sun failed to rise and set each day, (since the Crucifxion’s theft), and failed to activate the space with coloured light? I think not. While there is a lot of scepticism about the worth of colour therapy, (also known as Chromotherapy), an example might be: a blue room may initially cause feelings of calm, but the afect soon dissipates after a short period of time. In this case-study, that is all that is being asked for: a space where one could go for a small period of time, to retreat into a space of coloured light, before leaving to go back into our noisy full lives. Tis notion of the change of use of a building is common enough with buildings over time, buildings outgrow their original intended purpose, but with spiritual buildings this is always a more delicate situation. Te reader will no doubt have seen churches converted into houses and so forth. Te scared building has to be deconsecrated before the new use can be put into place. Opinions may vary on the validity of this but by way of example, some illustrious cousins to Futuna are: Ronchamp, La Tourette and church of Saint-Pierre at Firminy, (all by Le Corbusier), “Each has led a difcult life… Ronchamp remains a pilgrimage chapel, whose serenity returns very early and late in the day, but at other times can be overrun with tourists… La Tourette is still occupied by a small number of Dominican monks, but the monastery is otherwise flled with overnight visitors, primarily architects…Saint-Pierre is more problematic, for it was abandoned by the church decades ago and had to be completed with state funding, so that, while it has been consecrated and is periodically used for Sunday mass, it generally functions as a venue for tourism and cultural activities.” (Plummer: 2013, p. xii). So why not overlay another use for such a jewel like space? With the new purpose that is close to the original, that respects its original essence, better than turning the chapel into a storage shed for the much too close housing development adjacent! Futuna could be just one “coloured light-retreat” for any and every person to stop by at this little gem of a building, tucked away in suburban Wellington, and merely sit and be mesmerized into silence by the coloured light – a “retreat into coloured light.” Again quoting Henry Plummer: 5

“Te contemporary artist James Turrell has said: ‘Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.’ Attention to light itself, and not to the object it illuminates, is the point. In a similar way, by providing the time to live with light to watch its movement and feel its presence, to think about it and see into it, the twentieth-century work of “phenomenal architecture” as never before to evoke moods and feelings we feel inside ourselves – helping modern man escape the loneliness of his social system, and fll the void left by a ‘disappearance’ of God,” (Plummer: 2003, p. 28).

Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the support of the current Chair, (Nick Bevin), of Te Friends of Futuna Charitable Trust, in allowing the author access to photograph Futuna. I am also indebted to Roger Tackery and Ross de Roufgnac who kindly accepted the task of taking many photos of Futuna on my behalf.

Bibliography Bevin, N., (29.10.2010), [Edited email question about the date of Futuna Deconsecrating]. Busch, A., (2004), Geography of Home: Writings on Where we Live, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Ehm, B., Löfgren, O., (2010), Te Secret World of Doing Nothing, Berkeley: University of California Press. Maitland, S., (2009), A Book of Silence, London: Granta Publications. McElheny, J., (2010), Te Light Club (W. Werthern, Trans.), Chicago: Te University of Chicago Press. Parks, T., (2010), Teach Us to Sit Still, London: Harvill Secker. Plummer, H., (2003), Masters of Light Twentieth-Century Pioneers, Bankyo-ku: a+u Publishing Co. Ltd. Plummer, H., (2013), Cosmos of Light, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Saito, Y., (2002), Casa Barragan (5th ed.), Tokyo: TOTO Shuppan. Scheerbart, P., Taut, B., (1972), Glass Architecture and Alpine Architecture ( J. Palmes & S. Palmer, Trans.). New York: Praeger Publishers Inc. Street-Porter, T., (1989), Casa Mexicana, New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang. Turrell, J., (2006), A Life in Light, Paris: Somogy Publishing. Walden, R., (1987), Te Voices of Silence: New Zealand's Chapel of Futuna, Wellington: Victoria University Press. YELP, (2004-2010), Yelp: Real People. Real Reviews. YELP, Te Rothko Chapel, http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-rothko-chapel-houston [Retrieved 03.08.2013]

Biography Julian Rennie Bachelor of Architecture (First Class Honours). Graduate Diploma in Higher Education. He is a part time tutor at Unitec, within both the Department of Architecture and the Department of Landscape Architecture. He also is a partner in the architectural frm rennie dowsett architects. Has won various architectural prizes and awards within New Zealand.

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BLACK COLOUR IN ARCHITECTURE AND BUILT ENVIRONMENT JUSTINA TARAJKO-KOWALSKA Cracow Univeristy of Technology, Faculty of Architecture [email protected]

Abstract

Japanese philosophy says that the aesthetic value of achromatic colors - as black - is perceived only by those who can contemplate the beauty and richness of other colors. Black is in fact seen as a negative presence of color, because there is no true black without deprivation of the light. Black is the absence of hue and light through which often symbolizes the negative values. Associated with depth and darkness, evil and death, isolates from external factors. But at the same time e.g. in the European tradition, black has extraordinary power of attraction, becoming, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, the color of power, elegance and luxury. In architecture solid black façade fnish isn’t a typical choice, however there are some traditions of using black color in architecture and some regions where it’s used more often than in others. e.g. China, Japan, England, Denmark, Te Netherlands. In contemporary built environment one can observe increasing interest of black color use, which gives uniform, compact, heavy and sculpture-like appearance of the buildings. Modern materials and façade technologies make achieving glossy and deep shades of black possible, difcult to reach in plaster. Examples of black buildings – traditional and modern, big and small, landmarks and symbols as well as just good designed will be presented, together with material solutions for them. Black buildings are fashionable and trendy – like a “black pearl” or “black diamond” – precious and desirable…

Keywords

Black, Symbolism, Traditions

Introduction Black is a specifc achromatic colour, which is perceived by man due to great absorption of light by a given area, or illumination so low, that it does not stimulate visual perception. Tis is why it is often associated with the concept of darkness – the lack of light. According to Berlin and Kay (Berlin, Kay, 1969), in the languages with the least developed nomenclature there are only two defnitions: black (which also means dark – cold) and white (bright – warm). In Polish, the adjective “czarny” means that with the darkest possible colour and absorbing all light rays falling upon it, as well as illegal, dark, pessimistic. Te black colour has many meanings, which are often ambivalent. Te negative associations such as evil-devil, vileness, death, mourning, impurity, appear simultaneously not only with humility, modesty, and abandonment of life’s pleasures, but also with elegance, dignity, luxury, power, and law.

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Black colour architectural traditions Te black colour has been used by man in arts and architecture from the earliest times. Beside red, yellow, and white, this colour was used in the paintings of the Palaeolithic, including the famous Lascaux cave. According to Empedocles, these four colours also formed the basis for the palette of Greek painters (Rzepińska: 1989). Te frst works applied charcoal, while successive black colourings with greater depth and expressiveness were produced from burned animal bones (so-called bone black), and from the grinding of psilomelane crystals or other oxide minerals of manganese MnO 2 (so-called manganese black) (Pastoreau: 2008). Black was also the favourite colour in the interior decoration of ancient Greece, which is evidenced in the preserved historic monuments and the treatises of Vitruvius, who dedicated chapter 10 of volume VII of his work on architecture to methods of producing and applying black dyes, acquired mainly from the soot of oils, kerosene, tar, etc. burned without the access of air (lampblack) (Witruwiusz: 2004). Te popularity of black in interior decoration was also dominant among ancient Romans, whose sources for the production of black dyes included grapevines. Tis pigment, which was acquired from the carbonisation of plant tissue, cork, or seeds, was referred to in Medieval Europe as nigrum optimum – optimal black. Te traditional relations with the black colour in architecture can also be found in the cultures of the Far East. In Japan, black is the colour of Yin in the Yin-Yang theory. Yin is dark, heavy, and passive, symbolising soil and water, as well as the Earth. Dark colours are often seen in the Japanese architecture due to the wood commonly used in traditional construction, as it was often charred by fre for better protection from insects. Te roof tiles of traditional houses are also often dark grey or black. Te contemporary buildings are more colourful, but in many cities, e.g. Kyoto, the general palette continues to be dominated by dark and dim shades, as well as black, which visibly contrasts with the white of shoji – the traditional windows made from white rice paper (Lenclos: 2004). Today’s buildings sometimes refer to this tradition, including the Black Slit House (THREE.BALL.CASCADE architecture) in Okayama City, Villa SSK by Takeshi Hirobe Architects, Chiba1, or House O by Jun Igarashi Architects in Hokkaido from 2011. In China, the black colour is associated with water, which is one of the so-called fve elements, which, according to the Teory of Five Phases (or Five Elements), co-create the entire environment of human life, and interact under various combinations. It is associated with cold and winter, the northern direction, and is represented by the black tortoise. Terefore, the presence of black in architecture, particularly in traditional houses, is not surprising (Lee: 2012). Te black colour also plays a vital role in the tradition of Islam. Tis is the primary colour in the three-colour system, and it is associated with active energy, Saturn, the prophet Adam, and the metal lead. Tis is the colour of Al-Kaba, al-Kaaba (Arabic: cube, dice) – the temple and sanctuary in Mecca, the most important Islamic holy place, the spiritual centre of the Muslim religion, which is the destination of pilgrimages for all devoted Muslims who want to show respect for Muhammad. Te building is covered with the black screen called kiswah, which is decorated with embroidered gold verses from the Koran. Te eastern corner of the temple has an embedded black meteorite – the holy Black Stone (Hajar). Legend has it that it was brought by Archangel Gabriel and given to Abraham. Initially white, it turned black by absorbing the sins and guilt of the pilgrims paying homage to it. In the rural architecture of traditional Europe and America, the black colour was most often associated with material – wood or stone. It was present in the regions, which saw the application of tar and petroleum products to protect the framework of wooden houses (including the village of Ropianka in Poland). Due to the interaction of atmospheric factors or impregnation, the wood itself also frequently grew dark, resulting in the black surface of walls or roofs. Te dark surface of the wall was often in clear contrast to the white bands around the windows or the white gaps between the beams. Te beams of the so-called timber frame were also painted black in contrast to the brighter flling (Tarajko-Kowalska: 2006). Examples of such use are found on

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the coast of the Baltic Sea, on both the Polish and Swedish sides. Black is used to this day in Bornholm to paint the pedestals and wooden beams of building structures (Lenclos: 2004). Stone objects – particularly those built from various types of slate, mainly metamorphic slate – also received the black colour. Te northwest part of the Mexican municipality of Guadalajara is the home of the region known as Pueblos Negros (Black Pueblos) or Arquitectura negra (Black Architecture). Its peculiar name is owed to the common use of the local pizarra slate in the construction of houses, fencing, and other architectural elements. Its dark-grey and sometimes even black colour provides the architecture of numerous villages – particularly Majaelrayo – with a unique appearance 2. Te application of black on building facades is common in most countries of the northern, protestant Europe. It is predominant in such countries as England, Scotland, Iceland, Belgium, Denmark, or the Netherlands. Such popularity of black in northern Europe results mainly from the implementation of the so-called sumptuary laws, which cover the prohibition of using expensive dyes. Te 16 th century reformation maintained this trend, condemning the “immorality” of warm and bright colours, and encouraging the use of simple and raw ones, not only in apparel, but for residential buildings as well. Black buildings were not common in the countries always dominated by Christianity, due to the rather negative associations accompanying the colour and its direct relation to mourning. (Lenclos: 2004) Te black colour of the facades was not always intentional – in many cases, the initial, often bright colour of the facades became darker from pollution and exposure to atmospheric conditions, becoming similar to black after many years. Te black colour became an inseparable colour in numerous towns of the 19 th-century industrial revolution, which were polluted by the products of the combustion of coal, and later of other fuels. Over time, many of the buildings in European and American towns were covered with a layer of dark sediment, changing their original colours to black. An example of this is London, with its dark streets and smog-covered sky described in detail by Charles Dickens (1860). (Pastoreau: 2008) However, the black facades of the London houses also resulted from the common use of black bricks. Tey were used to build several front layers of the external walls due to their resistance to water, particularly in tenements from the Victorian era. Te most famous (not only in England) black London buildings certainly include that at 10 Downing Street, called “Number 10,” which served as the home and ofce of successive British Prime Ministers and Her Majesty's Government. Te ultimate form of the black brick facade was achieved in the 18 th century. Te original black oak doors from 1735 were replaced with armoured metal doors coated with a high quality, shiny black varnish after the IRA terrorist attacks in 1991.

Black in contemporary built environment Since the beginning of the 20 th century, the 1920s in particular, with the establishment of the aesthetics of Modernism, Bauhaus, and De Stijl, black, along with white, became the expression of modernity. Black almost always accompanied the white surfaces of the modernistic building walls as the colour of window frames and door wings, as well as balcony balustrades and structural steel beams (e.g. Te Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, built in 1924 by the Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld). Te most famous black buildings of this period include the Zwart Huis (literally Black House) in Knokke, Belgium, which was designed by the architect Huib Hoste in 1924. Te building, which was inspired by the aesthetics of De Stijl and covered with black plaster, was very revolutionary for its time. It was entered into the register of historic monuments in 2000, and continues to serve as a great example of modernism in Belgium to this day. (Rouw: 2009) However, the beginning of the 20 th century meant also Art Deco and the start of the American skyscrapers. During the years 1923-24, the architects Raymond Hood & André Fouilhou built a skyscraper at 40 West 3

40th Street in New York. Te black brick covering the facade minimises the contrast between the walls and the windows, providing the building with massiveness. However, the tradition of the black high risers did not establish itself until the 1940s, when the architect Mies van der Rohe created the canon of buildings constructed in a black, steel framework. Over a period of 30 years, he designed and built numerous buildings, mainly in the USA: in Chicago (including the one at 330 N. Wabash) and New York (Seagram Building, with Philip Jonson in 1958), but also in Canada (Toronto Dominion Center, Canada, 1969). Tese buildings found numerous imitators and became the prototypes for modern skyscrapers (e.g. John Hancock Center, SOM architecture, 1969). Also worth mentioning is Te CBS Building in New York City, located at 51 West 52nd Street, designed in 1965 by Eero Saarinen. Te building is known as Black Rock for the dark granite façade cladding. In the contemporary urban environment, the black colour is most frequent in the painting of the elements located in front of the proper, brighter wall surface, such as balcony balustrades, downpipes, windowsills, as well as window shutters and frames, door wings, and fnishing details. (Duttmann: 1981) Black varnish is often used to prevent the corrosion of wooden and iron elements (tar-based varnish) and lead (made from graphite), thus its application in the coatings of decorative grates and other forged elements. Associated with elegance and luxury, black often appears in store windows and signs, particularly of those carrying exclusive products, expensive jewellery and clothing, such as e.g. Swarovski, Hugo Boss, Giorgio Armani, or Gucci. Black is also often used as the colour of roof coatings – sheet metal, roofng paper, metal and bituminous tiles. Tis coating colour is currently common in regions, where the roofs were traditionally covered with shingles or lath. (Tarajko-Kowalska: 2006). Te signifcance of black in the colouring of interiors, architecture, and design increased in the 1980s, which was associated with the high-tech style. Te 1990s was the period dominated by achromatic colours, which was associated with the popularity of design minimalism. Black has become the colour of the current era, creation, power, and money – dominating not only the worlds of designers, fashion designers, or architects, but also those of lawyers and bankers. (Pastoreau: 2008) Te great popularity of black in architecture, not only in public buildings, but also private homes, even in countries without the tradition of its use, is dated at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. Numerous objects built near the end of the 20 th century and in the frst decade of the 21 st century became popular due to black, often receiving names or nicknames derived from this colour, referring to, among others, rare precious stones, such as black pearls or diamonds. One of the more interesting contemporary black buildings is the Danish National Library in Copenhagen, which was designed by SHL Architects in 1999. Te nickname of the building, the Black Diamond (Den Sorte Diamant), refers to its monolithic, irregular shape, as well as its granite coating of the facades. Te Absolute Black granite was extracted in Zimbabwe, then cut and polished in Italy. 3 Te building of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein) was built in Vaduz (Liechtenstein) in the year 2000. It was designed by the Swiss architects Meinrad Morger, Heinrich Degelo, and Christian Kerez. Te closed form of the “black box” is built from coloured concrete and black basalt.4 Tere is a grand building located next to the highway from the Taipei airport, called the Black Pearl. It was designed by Shin Takamatsu and built in 2002 for the Metropolitan Construction Company. Te black arched external protective wall is made from Safex laminated glass panels, the special surface of which is intended to protect the building from earthquakes and typhoons 5. Te Black Panther is the nickname given to the headquarters of the Uniopt Pachleitner Group, which was erected in 2011 in Graz, Austria, by the designers of GS Architects. Tanks to its sculpted form, sharp shapes, and black colour, the building has become the artistic hallmark of the city.

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Black pigments and materials in architecture Te material is an important element in the selection of the fnishing method for black facades. Te important aspects include the properties of its surface, texture, transparency or opacity, matt or shine, smoothness or roughness – all of the above afect the ultimate perception of the black form in the landscape. New technologies have allowed the production of new materials, such as coloured concrete, sheet metal, glass, prefabricated tiles, and ultimately paints and varnishes with a level of intensity impossible to achieve just a few years ago. Tese materials and techniques have greatly assisted the increased popularity of the black fnishing of building facades varying in typology, functions, and scale.

Wood Wood in various forms and from various types of trees has been used in architecture to obtain black from the earliest times. Te efect of black was obtained by submerging the beams or boards in oils, impregnation, charring, or simply varnishing. Tere are several noteworthy objects among contemporary buildings with wood applied on the facades. An experimental building was built in 2010 in the HTW Berlin University of Applied Sciences. Both the walls and the roof of the building were covered with scorched larch wood panels. Tis way of wood processing, which originates from Japan, emphasises its structure and porosity, simultaneously providing it with considerable resistance to external factors. 6 Te next building is the Knut Hamsun Museum in Norway, which was designed by Stephen Holl, who was inspired by the black rock walls of the Swiss Alps covered with white snow. Te body of the building was covered with tarred black wood, which commonly appears on the churches in the region. Te Swedish architects Tam & Videgård Hansson Arkitekter applied the interesting technology of stained black plywood panels, mounted in layers on a slowly grown pine framework in two buildings – the Museum of Modern Art in Kalmar, Sweden (2000), and in the House-K residential building in Stocksund, Djursholm.7 In 2008, the Dutch architects of Van Rooijen Architekten designed "Te Invitation" the De Meern Centre in Utrecht, Netherlands, the body of which was entirely covered with black stained wood. 8

Natural Stones Stone is another material giving numerous shades of black. Te various types of stone, such as slate or granite, are traditional construction materials in the various regions, which hosted the deposits of a given type of rock. One of the most interesting contemporary buildings built from black stone is the Giant's Causeway Tourist Centre in Ireland, which was designed by Heneghan Peng Architects (2012). Te appearance of the black stone pillars surrounding the building refers to the basalt columns formed by the volcanic eruption approximately 50 million years ago.9 Te residential social building for miners located in the heart of the Spanish Cantabrian Mountains, which was designed by ZON-E Architects in 2009, is like the locally produced coal – it absorbs almost all of the rays of light falling on it, which provides it with an evenly monumental appearance. Te material used in this case is the local black slate, which refers to the mining traditions of the town. 10

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Brick Black brick has been decorating the streets of numerous European cities for centuries. As already mentioned, it was made resistant to water in the 19 th century, which made it desired in cities susceptible to fooding, such as London. It is currently used only for aesthetic purposes, sometimes as facade fnishing. An example of this is the building of the London substation for the 2012 Olympic Park, which was designed in 2010 by NORD Architects. Te monolithic, simple form of the building and the perfect black brick facade ensured its victory in the category of non-residential buildings of the 2012 Wienerberger’s Brick Awards. 11

Plasters, paints and varnish It seems that there is no easier way to obtain black than painting. However, as much as the varnishes protecting iron or lead elements are durable and resistant to atmospheric factors, black paint and plaster should not be used in all cases. Dark plaster is not recommended in moderate climate zones (such as Poland) on an area greater than 10% of the facade due to increased absorption of solar rays, which can cause unfavourable thermal tension in the insulation layers, resulting in the cracking of the surface. Te application of three-layer or single-layer walls is a certain method to avoid this problem. Nevertheless, black-plastered buildings are rare, perhaps also due to the matt and non-expressive nature of the resulting black colour. Te building in Stuttgart-Möhringen, which became the object of the artistic experiment of Erik Storm and Simon Jung entitled the “House in Black” in May of 2008, is an interesting example. During the period preceding its demolition in 2009, the former home of a modern art gallery was covered top to bottom with matt black paint by the artists. For several months, the building transformed into a monumental sculpture and aroused great interest, becoming the subject of numerous photographs. 12 Te “Rose am Lend” building, located at Lendplatz in Graz, Austria, is an interesting example of applying black plaster for the entire facade surface. Renovated by the INNOCAD architects (Martin Lesjak, Peter Schwaiger, and Bernd Steinhuber) it attracts attention due to its black colour, which is livened by the additions of silicon carbide particles and grand rose-themed decorations, which refer to its name. (Isopp, 2009) Concrete structures painted black are also common solutions, for example in the 2009 building of the Marchesini France headquarters in Paris, which was designed by LAN Architecture 13, or in the ShinYatsushiro Monument lace pavilion in the Japanese prefecture of Kumamoto, designed by Kumiko Inui in 2004.14

Metal plate Today, sheet metal is eagerly used by designers, not just due to its durability and resistance, but also its very aesthetic appearance. An example is the new Sports Arena in Bytom (Poland), designed by Maćków Pracownia Projektowa, the form of which resembles a lump of coal. Te black rectangular cuboid of the building is covered with anthracite-coloured sheet metal and cut with deeply rooted glass, which is a clear reference to the region’s mining traditions.15

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Trespa® Meteon® panels Te Benchmark Trespa Facade System was created in cooperation with Trespa International BV. Te ecological Trespa Metreon panels, which are present in numerous paintworks and textures, are frequently chosen as a durable and aesthetic, facade fnishing. Two buildings from 2009 are interesting examples of the use of TRESPA® METEON® black panels on the entire facade surface: the European Centre of Ceramics in Limoges, France, designed by Atelier Jean Dubus, and the Tom Reilly Building of the John Moore University, in Liverpool, Great Britain, designed by Lord Austin-Smith.

Glass Due to its transparency and translucency, glass is always desired in facade fnishing. However, modern glass is often much diferent from just that in regular windows. Glass panels can be provided with almost any colour, while retaining their transparency. Te Black Box Ofce, in Wildes Meadow, Australia (Southern Highlands, New South Wales), is an old machine hall reconstructed by the Tina Tziallas Architecture Studio in 2012. Te simple body of the building was equipped with a facade made entirely of black glass, the large surfaces of which can be elevated, merging the interior with the exterior. 16

Other unique black materials Contemporary technology allows for the application of more innovative and avant-garde materials on facades. Some of them, such as membranes or insulations, are not associated with standard facade fnishing. However, architects are more eager to reach for unusual materials – often black, which additionally emphasises the ultimate visual efect. Tis is the case of the minimalistic house designed by the architects of Foaa-Norte in Calafquén, Chile, where a matt black asphalt membrane was used on the entire facade surface. 17 Te Jeferson Sheard & Careyjones Architects also decided to apply a unique method when designing the Soundhouse for the University of Shefeld in 2008. Te building is completely enveloped in black rubber. Te use of rubberised tanking as an exposed external membrane, was a very innovative design solution, but it was also a huge technical challenge to the designers.18 In the house Black Beauty in Linz (2005r.), xArchitekten used new kind of fberglass-reinforced concrete slab to implementing dark monolithic outer skin.19 In the house located in Budapest, Hungary (2012), T2.a Architects used UV-resistant façade membrane, which is water-proof from the outside but vapour-open from the inside. 20 But the most unique solution for the façade fnishing is the one for Artwood Showroom in San Miniato, Italy (2012). LDA.iMdA Architects converted the former warehouse into a design showroom for timber furniture brand Artwood. Te exterior of the building is covered with a black curtain with only one blackframed entrance, as there are no windows.21

Conclusions Black is the colour of both tradition and modernity. It looks very trendy and elegant, and gives a very decent and royal look to the building. Completely black cladding of the building highlights its sculptural quality. Black is simultaneously bold and neutral, creating a statement without clashing against its background. 7

Bibliography Berlin, B., Kay, P., (1969), Basic Color Terms: Teir Universality and Evolution, Berkeley: University of California Press. Duttmann M., Schmuck F., Uhl J., (1981), Color in Townscape, San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. Lee, Tien-Rein, (2012), Heaven, Earth and Humans: Color Harmony in Chinese Culture, Budapest, Hungary: Proceedings of 5th Colour Specialists International Conference in Hungary. Lenclos, J-P., Lenclos, D., (2004), Colors of the World – Te Geography of Color, NY-London: W.W. Norton& Company. Pastoureau, M., (2008), Black: Te History of a Color, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rouw, K., Komossa, S., Hillen, J. (ed.), (2009), Colour in Contemporary Architecture: projects/ essays/ calendar/ manifestoes, Amsterdam: SUN. Rzepińska, M., (1989), Historia koloru w dziejach malarstwa europejskiego, Warsaw: Arkady. Tarajko-Kowalska, J., (2006), Kolor w wiejskich zespołach architektoniczno-krajobrazowych – ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem wsi Polski Południowej, Krakw: Politechnika Krakowska. Varichon, A., (2006), Colors – what they mean and how to make them, New York: Abrams. Witruwiusz, (2004), O architekturze ksiąg dziesięć, Warsaw: Prószyński i S-ka. Isopp, A., (2009), Residential and retail building, http://www.a10.eu/magazine/issues/28/building_graz.html [retrieved 26.07.2013]. Popp, P., 12.02.2013, Tree colours – Red Black Green: Landscape Park in Copenhagen, http://www.detailonline.com/architecture/topics/three-colours-red-black-green-landscape-park-in-copenhagen-020724.html [retrieved 14.08.2013] Black Buildings: 15 Examples of Monochromatic Architecture, 08.10.2012, http://weburbanist.com/2012/10/08/black-buildings-15-dark-examples-of-monochromatic-architecture/ [retrieved 26.07.2013]. http://www.archdaily.com/153189/social-housing-for-mine-workers-zon-e-arquitectos/ [retrieved 25.08.2013]. http://www.archdaily.com/239389/black-box-tina-tziallas-factor-design/ [retrieved 27.08.2013]. http://www.archdaily.com/240218/house-for-sale-in-calafquen-foaa-norte/ [retrieved 21.08.2013]. http://www.dezeen.com/2012/01/06/artwood-showroom-by-lda-imda-architects/ [retrieved 26.07.2013]. http://www.dezeen.com/2012/10/18/giants-causeway-visitors-centre-by-heneghan-peng-architects/ [retrieved 26.07.2013]. http://www.enob.info/en/solar-decathlon-europe-2010/berlin/[retrieved 27.08.2013]. http://www.homesthetics.net/the-royal-library-in-denmark-by-shl-architects/ [retrieved 26.07.2013]. http://www.inuiuni.com/projects/246/ [retrieved 20.08.2013]. http://www.jefersonsheard.com/projects/learning/soundhouse-the-university-of-shefeld [retrieved 27.08.2013]. http://www.karin-abt-straubinger-stiftung.de/kas/cms/front_content.php?idart=103 [retrieved 27.08.2013]. http://www.kingspanbenchmark.info/benchmark-facades-trespa-meteonfacades.html#sthash.w7jlbMxv.dpuf [retrieved 27.08.2013]. http://www.safex.com/pdf/Vanceva ® Color by Safex™ Black Pearl.pdf [retrieved 27.08.2013]. http://www.tvark.se/house-k/ [retrieved 27.08.2013]. http://www.tvark.se/kalmar-museum-of-art/ [retrieved 23.08.2013]. http://www.vanrooijenarchitecten.nl/2-projecten/utiliteitsbouw/theinvitation/projecten.html [retrieved 20.08.2013]. http://www.xarchitekten.com/ [retrieved 27.08.2013]. Why is the door at 10 Downing St so shiny?, 12 May 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8677004.stm [retrieved 27.08.2013]. www.kunstmuseum.li [retrieved 26.07.2013]. http://t2a.hu/en/news/housing/black-magic-2 [retrieved 27.08.2013]. 8

Biography Justyna Tarajko-Kowalska, architect, academic teacher, since 2001 is working at the Faculty of Architecture, Cracow University of Technology. She is the author of over 30 articles on the issue of color in architecture; she took part to numerous conferences and scientifc sessions on colour - including the AIC International Congresses. Since 2005, she is member of the Environmental Color Design Study Group. She is the author and co-author of several studies supporting the selection of elevation colors, developed for producers of facade paints and plasters.

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1

hirobe.s2.bindsite.jp

2

www.guadalajaraturismo.com/pueblos-negros

3

http://www.homesthetics.net/the-royal-library-in-denmark-by-shl-architects/

4

www.kunstmuseum.li

5

http://www.safex.com/pdf/Vanceva ® Color by Safex™ Black Pearl.pdf

6

http://www.enob.info/en/solar-decathlon-europe-2010/berlin/

7

http://www.tvark.se/house-k/

8

http://www.vanrooijenarchitecten.nl/2-projecten/utiliteitsbouw/theinvitation/projecten.html

9

http://nordarchitecture.com/projects/primary-substation-2012-olympics/

10

http://www.karin-abt-straubinger-stiftung.de/kas/cms/front_content.php?idart=103

11

http://www.lan-paris.com/project-Marchesini.html

12

http://www.inuiuni.com/projects/246/

13

http://www.mackow.pl/projekty/funkcja/publiczne,hala_sportowa__na_skarpie_bytom

14

http://www.archdaily.com/239389/black-box-tina-tziallas-factor-design/

15

http://www.archdaily.com/240218/house-for-sale-in-calafquen-foaa-norte/

16

http://www.jefersonsheard.com/projects/learning/soundhouse-the-university-of-shefeld

17

http://www.xarchitekten.com/

18

http://t2a.hu/en/news/housing/black-magic-2

19

http://www.dezeen.com/2012/01/06/artwood-showroom-by-lda-imda-architects/

20

http://t2a.hu/en/news/housing/black-magic-2

21

http://www.dezeen.com/2012/01/06/artwood-showroom-by-lda-imda-architects/

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CRYSTAL IN ARCHITECTURE BRUSTOLON VERONICA, DE MONTE ROBERTA Dept of Design and Planning in Complex Environments-University IUAV of Venice [email protected] Dept of Design and Planning in Complex Environments-University IUAV of Venice [email protected]

Abstract

Giò Ponti used to say that architecture is a crystal, something extremely frail but at the same time characterized by a unique and durable beauty. Tis is the fundamental principle of the Lasvit, a company founded in 2007 within the productive area of the Czech Republic: the Bohemia. Te will of the founder Leon Jakimic was to renovate the ancient bohemian tradition using new techniques and new applications. For this reason he decided to collaborate with the most important local and international designers, such as Philippe Starck, Ross Lovegrove and Nendo. Te results of this collaboration were incredible: thanks to the skills of the master glaziers in combination with the coloured led technology, Lasvit created huge installations inside the most important hotels, museums, galleries and airports. For example, one of the last creations presented at the Fuori Salone of Milan was the Liquidkristal, an high precision process of heat transfer on a plate creating organic glass panels, perfect for big architectural installations. Tis technique is able to create any kind of mathematical described pictures that may be looped creating a pattern that seems fow through the building’s or installation’s walls. Te paper will describe the new technologies created by Lasvit through the study and the analysis of the main works of the company.

Keywords

Colour, Crystal, Glass, Lighting

Introduction Leon Jakimic is considered one of the greatest experts in the world in the art of crystal production. In fact, after graduating in economics awarded in California, he decided to return to his homeland, the Czech Republic, to found in 2007 the Lasvit, today considered the leading company in the feld of glassware. Te secret of the success of Lasvit (whose name in Czech means “love of light”, from the combination of “laska”/love and “svit”/light) is the union between the Czech tradition of glassblowing and the ability of the founder in advertising this art by entrusting the design of objects to designers of international fame. Te team is also made up of artist-engineers who work with capacitive skills and creative sense, in addition to being light-designers, in fact, they usually insert plays of light in Lasvit’s works, which, combine with glass, create special efects. 1

History and tradition Te glass and the working of this amazing material have ancient origins; it is reported that in fact already in the Phoenician people began to appear the frst processing techniques to transform the glass vases and decorations much appreciated all over the known world. Such was the importance and value of the glass, which it survived throughout the centuries and the techniques were passed down from generation to generation through the people who, over time, improved and perfected. Te 1450 was the year in which was experienced a new turning point in the history of glass, on this date, in fact, in Italy was born the crystal, created from glass with the addition of sodium and manganese. Obviously, this technique also arrived in Bohemia, a historical region of Central Europe, already famous for its vast production of glass and the sophisticated manufacturing techniques. Te workers of Bohemian discovered that potassium combined with chalk created a clear colourless glass that was more stable than the one coming from Italy. It was in this period that emerged for the frst time in the history the term “Bohemian crystal” to distinguish its qualities from the glass of other places. Te craftsmen of Bohemia became experts in the art of working with glass that has become famous for its excellent cut and engraving, then later they also became qualifed teachers for all countries near and far. Producing all kinds of objects, even pearls, Bohemia soon became a formidable rival of Venice. Te Napoleonic Wars of the XIX Century changed the political aspect of Europe and, the addition to the Austrian Empire of Bohemia and Venice, between 1815 and 1866, did not eliminate the competition between these two regions, which had always been ferce. In the face of this antagonism, the Czech masters found something new that has allowed them to expand their markets, in fact, during the XIX century, they journeyed long, asking people they met from country to country what kind of pearls wished, then they returned to Bohemia with many sketches for the construction of new pearls, since gems Czech distinguished from those Venetian style and colour. Venice sustained to focus on the glass beads by hand, while the Czechs became masters of pressed glass, both regions, however, have continued to refne and improve all forms of processing over the centuries. By the mid-nineteenth Century, in Bohemia was created a school system for the glass making technique that encouraged the traditional and innovative methods, also favoured the technical preparation of future artisans and craftsmen of the glass. In the second half of the same century, Bohemia engaged in export trade and mass production of coloured glass for shipment worldwide. Even now, when we speak of “Bohemian crystal” it refers to the ease of processing, hardness and to unmistakable beauty that has made this material one of the most beautiful ever created so that it depopulated markets pushing factories to refne processing techniques.

Liquidkrystal and Lasvit Crystal Walls Lasvit is in the vanguard of the crystaglassware sector for its intent to innovate the “material of materials” trying it out for every possible technics, like complex glassblowing and glass printing, worked in all of its possibilities. Te reason why it’s called contemporary glass is that Leon Jakimic pulled together great Czech designers like Rony Plesl and Jitka Kamencova Skuhrava with international names like Philippe Starck, Fabio Novembre, Ross Lovegrove and Nendo, particularly the last two are the authors of the new products exhibited at the Salone del Mobile di Milano in 2012. In particular, the Lovegrove’s work, Liquidkristal, is a high precision heat transfer process of creating organiclike glass panels, developed towards the innovative use of the material in large-scale architectural installations. 2

Fig. n.1 - Lasvit Liquidkristal, by Ross Lovegrove

Te system permits the precise forming of any mathematically describable design, and individual panels can showcase slightly “shifted” versions of the model, creating the efect of an organically fowing pattern across a building or other large structure. Te innovative method also lets designers or architects control the level of opacity of segments of glass, utilizable in creating spaces where certain features are highlighted and others blend of into a blurry play of colour and light. At the Triennale di Milano during Milan Design Week 2012, Lovegrove and Lasvit exhibited the Liquidkristal technology in the Lasvit Liquidkristal Pavilion: a curved, fowing installation open to exploration by visitors, upon which video by computational designers biothing was projected to highlight the refective qualities of the material. Te panels themselves are smooth on their exterior, while the inner surface follows a valley of dips and pockets, which is what causes the fascinating play of light on objects visualized through the panels from any angle. To develop the technique, Ross Lovegrove and a research team at Lasvit used fuid dynamics research to investigate the densifcation of large-scale patterns in nature. Tis information was then inserted into mathematical models to develop the thermal inductive process, or 'high precision heat transfer', that underlies the glass's production. Liquidkristal is most fundamentally a process: an innovative technique of molding glass that enables a high level of precision. Lovegrove envisions the project as the frst step in what is more importantly “project based design”. “I'll lend [architects and designers] my technology”, he explains, and have them develop their own designs for use in their work, listing David Chipperfeld, Toyo Ito, Tokujin Yoshioka, and Zaha Hadid among the architects whom he would like to collaborate. His own future research with the technology might include investigating the use of special coatings or the embedding of solar panels into the units, or flling the glass pockets with solid materials to ofer additional refective efects. 3

“Glass is a facilitator of giving you all the acoustic and climatic comfort but it also gives you that visibility and to take that to another level where you zone it, instead of it just being a repeated sheet, doesn't sound like a radical idea [but it is]. We are talking about design as an efective tool to create jobs, to build new businesses; to create a new sparkle in an industry that is a little bit overlooked in my estimation” . So Ross Lovegrove describes his project for Lasvit.

Fig. n. 2 - Lasvit Liquidkristal by Ross Lovegrove (photo Simona Cupoli)

Another important aspect of these panels, whether located inside or outside, is represented by the play of light and refections that the wavy surface creates if exposed to daylight and/or artifcial light. Artists/designers involved in searches at the Lasvit deal with the possible placement of light sources and apparatus that control, manage, reduce, enhance or modify the emission of light in their installations. In fact, checking the light also help to control the balance of the opera, the composition, the atmosphere and the feelings generated by colors. Te relationship among the glass, the interior space and the surrounding environment are the results of infnite modulations, primarily organized by the balance of shadow and light. Te dose of light represents a frst selection in the characterization of interior spaces. In addition, the choices regarding the focus are also very important: operating on a difuse or clear light means activating a perception of surfaces, corners, recesses that shows a lot of variables. However, Liquidkristal is not the frst experience in the feld of architecture for Lansvit; in fact, during the Salone del mobile di Milano in 2010 the Czech ofce Koncern presented the Lasvit Crystal Walls project. Lasvit Crystal Walls is an original prefabricated module consisting in crystal components with pre-defned model options and a highly esthetic efect. Te module is a new mutable device, unique for its quality, set at the edge between applied and fne arts. Lasvit Crystal Walls represents a brand new alternative for the arrangement of deluxe and representative interior spaces of any kind, all the while embracing the custom of glass application as seen in the Czechoslovak representative architecture of the 1960’s and the 1970’s.

4

Tree basic types of bearing structures enable to form original decorative structures ft for smaller indoors areas as well as in huge projects. A typical use of this product with a reinforced bearing structure could be for instance a wall running up several foors in the lobby of a large building. Te Lasvit Crystal Walls design involves digitally recurring structures of crystal glass segments, remotely reminding of the ancient decorative patterns and processes used to create forged bars in the medieval castles of Central Europe. With simple crystal elements – two basic and three side or corner elements – you can create about twenty models, from puristic geometrical structures to rich decorative patterns. Even the range of the Lasvit Crystal Walls artistic prototypes is very wide – from modern abstraction to variations based on ancient oriental motifs. Te color is another important visual element. Lasvit Crystal Walls can be produced either in a traditional transparent version, or in an elegant version of crystal with metal-plate, three colors available.

Conclusions Even now, the Bohemian crystal is one of the most precious and refned crystals of the world and is the pride of its ancient region of origin, that isn’t existing today. In fact, the cities and towns of the ex-Bohemia are still considered the birthplace of the most precious crystal and their streets are full of small shops and boutiques selling bohemian crystals. As shown above, an important tribute was given by Lasvit with his study and technical application that the company is still developing. Te architectural interest of this technics, demonstrated by the examples mentioned above represent a new potential for the future of the bohemian crystal.

Bibliography Drahotova, O., (1991), L’Arte del vetro in Europa, La Spezia: Fratelli Melita Editori. František, K., (1960), Panorama della storia cecoslovacca, Praga: Orbis. Pešatová, Z., (1968), Bohemian Engraved Glass, Londra: Hamlyn. Stuparich, G., (1969), La nazione ceca, Milano: Longanesi. http://www.sapere.it/enciclopedia/Bo%C3%A8mia.html http://lasvit.com/ http://www.domusweb.it/it/design/2012/02/20/lasvit-esperienza-antica--giovane-passione.html

Biography Veronica Brustolon was born in Frankfurt (Germany) in 1987. Graduated in 2012 at the IUAV University of Architecture in Venice, with a degree thesis about Media-Facades. In 2010, did an internship at the studio of architecture Ceschia&Mentil, in Venice. Partecipated in two study-tours to New York and Netherlands_Germany. Teaching assistant in ‘architectural technology’ at the Polytechnic of Milan, editor of Screencity- International Academic Journal, interesting in new technologies for media-building and smart glass facades. At the time, is research fellow at the University IUAV of Venice. Roberta De Monte was born in 1988 in Valdobbiadene (Treviso). She graduated in 2012 at the University IUAV of Venice, Master in Building Technology, with a thesis on new media façades. Trainee at the studio TAMassociati (Venice) and Laboratorio2729 (Venice), she participated in two study-tours to New York, Holland and Germany. She is now attending the Second Level Master Degree in Digital Architecture. 5

WANG SHU: FACADES AS MATERIAL AND TACTILE STRATIFICATIONS GIUSEPPINA SCAVUZZO University of Trieste, Department of Engineering and Architecture [email protected]

Abstract

Alongside research on high-tech architectural coverings and facades, projects are emerging that emphasize a primordial and tactile relationship with materials. Tis often coincides with an interest in the local and primitive that suggests a resistance to globalization. Te works of Chinese architect Wang Shu are perfect examples of this trend. His architectural works are multi-material assemblies in which raw materials and leftover materials from demolitions of old villages are assembled by combining modern and traditional techniques, developed together with local craftsmen. Tis physical intimacy with the material paradoxically gives architecture a dimension of universality that transcends the local, because the return to the roots of constructing arouses tactile emotions and ancestral memories that can be universally shared. Wang Shu’s vernacular and modern architecture is an afrmation of the possibility of an alternative modernity, of the importance of cultural sustainability as well as eco-sustainability.

Keywords

Architecture, Built Environment, Materiality, Recycling, Texture Surface

Material, local, universal Alongside research on high-tech architectural coverings and facades, projects are emerging in diferent cultural and climatic contexts that, in contrast, emphasise a primordial, tactile relationship with materials. Paradoxically, this return to matter seems to answer an almost spiritual need in reaction to the economistic materialism dominating contemporary globalisation. Globalisation, dominated by the market and by technique, is characterised by a pervasive immateriality of fnancial fows, information and images. Similarly, its architectural expression also leans towards immateriality (Fernández-Galiano: 2013). Tis immateriality is expressed frst in the digital prefguration of architecture and then in the aspiration to maintain this virtual character in the actual construction by using technologies that tend to dematerialise buildings through transparency, extreme clarity and smoothness, and therefore refection, or by turning the facades into screens for virtual images. I believe that the dominant market culture risks betraying the authentically innovative – and in some cases even provocative – nature of these experimentations, pushing them towards commercialism. While the market demands and glorifes this type of architecture, encouraging research in this direction, a counter-trend seems to be coming to the fore, supported by the demands of economic austerity dictated by the crisis, but also by an increasingly widespread environmental awareness. Te latter results not only in the focus on 1

sustainability and energy saving, to which high-tech projects must also aspire, but also in a cultural and spiritual need to establish a bond, albeit visceral, with nature and the earth. After the drunken binge in an artifcial and psychedelic world, dominated by sophisticated but often also superfuous techniques and by a technological and futurist exaltation which, in the end, does not ofer really desirable scenarios of life, the need to return to the essential sources of construction is emerging. As Hegel put it, this is construction understood as the “architectural cultivation of the earth” to meet the basic needs of man through the humility of raw materials. Tis return involves the rediscovery of traditional techniques that process materials readily available in situ, creating a strong bond with the environment, the landscape, the climate and the local economy. Tis trend takes the form of resistance to a globalisation which erases specifcity and local memories, but paradoxically gives architecture a dimension of universality that transcends the local, because the return to the roots of constructing arouses tactile emotions and ancestral memories that can be universally shared. Tese emotions flter mainly through the sensitive skin of such architecture when it takes the form of a textural and tactile collage, the stratifcation of tactile memories, references and afnities with the surrounding landscape.

The walls of Wang Shu Confrmation of this premise is the fact that the return to the material emerges in contexts in which the destruction of all roots has been systematically planned and pursued; countries where the alliance between technique, market and aspiration to modernity has produced macro projects that are indiferent to the surrounding environment and landscape. Te works of Chinese architect Wang Shu, winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2012, are examples of the desire to oppose indiference to the location and oblivion of the past; his architectural works are multimaterial assemblies in which raw materials and leftover materials from demolitions carried out in the name of growth are assembled by combining traditional and modern techniques. Te raw materials used by Wang Shu are, above all, earth and ceramics, either in the reuse of bricks and tiles from old buildings or the making of new ones from scratch using traditional techniques. Earth is a building material that has been used in China for 3000 years, and it is still used in the countryside, where it is estimated that half of the houses are built of earth (Shu: 2010). Ceramic is most directly derived from earth and, like earth, is a material that breathes, is alive. Wang Shu has mainly used the immense deposit resulting from the demolition of traditional villages. In the Hangzhou region, the plan for renovating traditional buildings led to old bricks dating back even to the Qing Dynasty being abandoned. Tese are now available at half the price of new industrial products with inferior performance and aesthetic qualities. Tiled Garden (2006), created by Wang Shu for the 10th Venice Biennale of Architecture, was constructed with a bamboo structure made up of 5000 pieces, and 60,000 of these recycled old tiles: a huge roof which, through the material and tactile richness of the old handmade tiles marked by time, becomes an evocative landscape (Fig.1). Other materials used are wood, which Wang Shu learned to use as a young man working alongside craftsmen, and bamboo, which occupies a special place in Chinese culture. As well as its resistance, low tendency to rot and elasticity making it an ideal material for making everyday objects, symbolic and aesthetic qualities were added. Te Chinese poet composes while contemplating a bamboo grove (Marcel: 2013): the young bamboo has female grace and slenderness, the mature bamboo has male solidity: to the touch, a big bamboo feels smooth and compact but when beaten with the knuckles sounds hollow; by making just a few cuts, it becomes a musical instrument. Tese natural materials are used by Wang Shu along with cement and steel, combining traditional popular techniques with modern technology.

2

In the Ningbo History Museum (2003-2008), 20 diferent types of bricks, stones and old tiles from the demolition of 15 villages destroyed in the region have been put together using the Wapan technique, a fast and simple construction method used by Chinese peasants to quickly rebuild villages after typhoons or landslides, reusing the remains of destroyed buildings (Fig. 2). Again, a traditional technique has been studied and developed to meet the needs of a modern building. In fact, traditional Wapan would have imposed precise limits to the building’s dimensions. After dozens of experiments, Wang Shu perfected a mixed system with reinforced concrete beams, sometimes exposed and sometimes inside the thickness of the walls flled with lighter recycled materials. Tis has resulted in excellent structural performance and insulation, in continuity with local building culture, and also the restoration of a lost memory at an afordable price: Wang Shu tells the story of an elderly woman from one of the villages destroyed in the urban renewal plan who visits the museum every day because she feels at home there, being able to touch the old bricks from her town. Te builders could arrange the recycled tiles, bricks and stones according to their own whim and was not planned by the architect. Tis renunciation of a personal, self-referential statement is one of the main diferences between traditional Chinese and Western architectural culture (Shu: 2010). Te colours of the bricks, stones and tiles thus form a mélange that is unexpected but in keeping with the landscape, whence the materials come. However, according to Wang Shu, this multi-material building cannot be said to be completed: the relationship between nature and the human being will only be achieved once the walls have been covered with lichens and other vegetation – in other words, when nature has retaken possession of the substance it has loaned man to make the construction material.

Manual labour as a model Wang Shu attempts to overcome the confict between modernity and tradition without repeating local stylistic models or historical patterns, but by drawing on memory and fltering it through manual labour: “the signifcance of the building lives in the hands of the workers” he says, because artisanal manual labour responds to need in the easiest way through its use of readily available materials. Wang Shu accuses modern architecture of doing the opposite: it starts with the architect’s desire to create something s/he has in mind, using the materials s/he has in mind, even if these are only available in distant locations or the production methods for limiting energy consumption are very complicated (Shu: 2010). Wang Shu's predilection for manual labour unites manual construction work with the artisanal production of everyday objects, but also his own working method: hand-drawing projects and his daily practise in the ancient art of calligraphy. A fne example of this ideal and practical relationship with manual labour and craftsmanship is the cofeehouse built in Jinhua, the Ceramic House (2003-2006). It is one of 16 small buildings, or follies, created by Chinese and international architects and artists for the Jinhua Art and Architecture Park, curated by the artist Ai Weiwei. Te structure of this small house recalls the form and working principle of the ancient ink stones used in calligraphy, which have a fat part and a slanted part to collect the ink (Shu: 2010). Tis principle is used to achieve the passive ventilation of the building, whose form allows the breeze from the nearby watercourse to pass through it and, on the other hand, serves to drain rainwater (Fig. 3). Glazed ceramic tiles cover the Ceramic House both externally and internally. Wang Shu and master potter Wu Zhou, who made them, selected 40 shades of enamel for the tiles, which were then stuck to the surfaces in no specifc order. Te colours are all from the tradition of Zhejiang province, which was renowned in ancient China for the colours of its ceramics, especially blue. Te tiles also reproduce the shape of the ink stones, the coloured enamel replacing the ink. I would defne a building made in this way as the architectural realisation of a metonymy, the rhetorical fgure that results from the mental association of two realities in relationship and replacing the name of one 3

with the other: for example by calling the container the contained, the cause the efect, the material the object, and the part the whole. Derrida has already defned the Follies of Tshumi’s Parc de la Villette as an architectural metonymy, as the part that indicates the whole (the rest of the park), recalling its divisibility into parts. By calling into question what had until then had given meaning to architecture, for Derrida the Follies ushered in deconstructivism (Derrida: 1987). Here, the part indicates the whole because the entire architecture responds to the same principle as the artisan’s handmade object, and what gives meaning to the architecture is that it satisfes a material and poetic need in the simplest way, and does so by leaving impressed the unique mark of what has been made by hand. Continuing the comparison with Derrida’s interpretation of Tshumi’s follies, we could say that Wang Shu’s metonymy hopes to usher in a new humanism, a modern architecture which, by tapping into popular and material culture, goes back to using technique not as a goal but as a tool of necessity. Te acceptance of imperfection, an exercise in humility and authenticity, is emblematic of this relationship with technique. For example, in creating the broad walls of the Ningbo Museum, the workers were not always able to proceed in a perfectly straight line when they assembled heterogeneous materials; this imperfection, which was never corrected, has given movement to the surface of the museum, like the skin of a living animal. In contrast, the exaltation of technique, typical of contemporary globalisation, contains an idea of beauty tied to anything that proclaims itself to be new, shiny and perfect. In this way, some contemporary architecture seems to be telling us, from an alien world of technological perfection, that we are all too human, with our imperfect bodies that are subject to ageing. Architecture that uses raw and rough materials is subject to change over time, it ages along with humans, but at the same time it is renewable, it continues to live, stretching us out towards nature’s cycles, in which everything changes and even that which seems to die becomes nourishment for other life.

Vernacular and natural Te relationship with the past in Chinese culture is far removed from the sense of Western history. In China, there is not that tradition of critical historical thinking which in the West led to an ebb and fow between the return to the ancient and subsequent reactions, followed by as many returns, reactions and re-workings in the artistic and architectural feld. In China, the past is handed down more through words, writings and oral tradition than through constructions and monuments in the Western sense (Botz-Bornstein: 2009). Many Chinese constructions of the past have not been preserved intact, or with all their authentic parts, as we would defne them in the West, not only due to damage and destruction as a result of political and historical events, but also because they were not designed to last: the materials used were meant to be replaced over time, as if they were living beings or, to use a metaphor dear to Wang Shu, gardens to be maintained. However, today's young Chinese architects are learning Western construction methods which Wang Shu believes are good for building infrastructure, but not for meeting the needs of living. Wang Shu identifes contemporary living requirements with the ancestral construction of a house, whether designing homes, schools, museums or entire cities (Shu: 2012). According to Wang Shu, the main value that Chinese architects must preserve from their tradition is naturalness: in China each building was designed in continuity with nature, imitating it to achieve harmony. Tere was no distinction between the construction of a garden and that of a house or a city (Shu: 2010). But for tradition to remain alive, it must be renewed, not immobilised in repetition. Traditional techniques, hitherto absent from university architecture courses, are thus studied by Wang Shu and his students, together with the craftsmen who still possess and keep alive the skills inherited from the past, making them evolve. Tis is why Wang Shu defnes his architecture as “vernacular and modern” in a sense that comes close to the Critical Regionalism theorised by Frampton (Botz-Bornstein: 2009), but does not identify itself completely 4

with it. It is part of the tradition but lacks a critical approach, which would be foreign to it, instead seeking continuity in "naturalness", in an idea of history that is not progressive but cyclical, like nature. Tis lack of a critical or controversial attitude diferentiates the work of Wang Shu from that of another Chinese artist and intellectual, famous in the West, Ai Weiwei, with whom Wang Shu worked on the Jinhua Park project. However, even without sharing Ai Weiwei’s political dissidence, Wang Shu and his Amateur Architecture Studio continue a resistance to the professionalism (Shu: 2012) and dictatorship of the market. His material walls are an afrmation of the freedom to be diferent and the possibility of an alternative modernity.

Conclusions: Architecture as a seed Responding to those who asked why he had presented an installation such as the Tiled Garden at the Venice Biennale, which that year was dedicated to the theme of the metropolis, Wang Shu replied that for him the garden is a seed: a city can be born from it (Shu: 2010). Tis answer refers to his interest in the tradition of the Chinese garden, in naturalness as a model for urban development. Te organic metaphor of the seed seems to capture and synthesise the universal value of Wang Shu’s work, which transcends considerations about local Chinese tradition. In her research on a “poetic reason” that releases “those things of the human soul that faith in progress neglects”, Spanish philosopher Maria Zambrano speaks of the signs of the artist, calling them seeds that are capable of germinating (Zambrano: 1977). Tis well describes the symbolic attitude of the signs of architecture, representing it as a fertile activity or “architectural cultivation of the earth”. Te metaphor of the seed reiterates the social and ethical role of architecture, because environmental awareness and sustainability are not only good building practice, and ultimately a technical-regulatory requirement, which is still a dominant technical tool, but they also confer on the language of architecture its ability to express meanings, to return us to the primary condition of inhabitants of the universe. Not surprisingly, Wang Shu speaks of “sustainable aesthetics” (Shu: 2010) and thus of cultural sustainability as well as eco-sustainability. Architectural composition and civil responsibility are inseparable: the timeless poetic language of composition is regenerated from its roots; and its signs and its primordial matter become seeds and promise a continuation of life. Tis is exactly how Wang Shu’s architecture reaches out to the future in a vital way, not denying the past but feeding on it.

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Fig. n. 1 - Tiled Garden, 2010, 10th Venice Biennale of Architecture, Venice, Italy. Photo by Lu Wenyu

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Fig. n.2 - Ningbo History Museum, 2003-2008, Ningbo, China. Photo by Lv Hengzhong

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Fig. n. 3 - Ceramic House, 2003-2006, Jinhua, China . Photo by Lv Hengzhong

Bibliography Hegel, F., (1997), Estetica, Turin: Einaudi. Derrida, J., (2008), Psyché. Invenzioni dell’altro, Milan: Jaca Book, (or Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, Paris: Galilée, 1987). Zambrano, M., (2004), Chiari del bosco, Milan: Bruno Mondadori Editori, (or Claros del bosque, Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1977). Botz-Bornstein, T., (2009), “Wang Shu and the Possibilities of Architectural Regionalism in China”, in Nordic Journal of Architectural Research, Vol. 21, No.1, pp.4-17, Helsinki: Ed. Nordic Association for Architectural Research. Maglica, I., (2010), “Amateur Architecture Studio. Museo di storia locale a Ningbo, Zhejiang”, in Costruire in laterizio, No. 135, pp.10-15, Milan: Tecniche Nuove S.p.A. 8

Shu, W., (2010), “Desde la tierra a la cerámica, una construcción viva”, in Ensayos Sobre Arquitectura Y Cerámica, vol. 2, pp. 19-35, Madrid: Mairea Libros - Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura. Shu, W., (2012), Imagining the house, Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers. Marcel, A., (2013), Traité de la cabane solitaire, Parigi: Arléa. Fernández-Galiano, L., (2013) “Materia local”, in Arquitectura Viva, Vol. 4, No. 151, p. 3, Madrid: Arquitectura Viva SL.

Biography Giuseppina Scavuzzo, researcher in Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Trieste, Department of Engineering and Architecture. PhD in Architectural Composition at the University Iuav of Venice, in 2004 was reasearch fellow of the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. Member of the Iuav research group “Colour and Light in Architecture”.

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BLACK AND WHITE SCREEN AND THE CITY: CONTESSA DI PARMA BECOMES SMART ORNELLA CASTIGLIONE Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca [email protected]

Abstract

Tis paper aims to analyze some elements of medial development due to the digital convergence and to the infuence of visual communication in the urban space like “city of screens” and “screen city”, according to the relocation of the cinema phenomenon. Te image of the screen has became a symbol of our contemporary, it appears at the same time as a results of many computational processes and as a mirror, or a window, or a threshold of access to the real world. Alessandro Blasetti, one of the greater Italian flmmakers, in 1937 shot in Torino Contessa di Parma in which the screen can be read as a diaphragm of the narration and as symbolic object. Contessa, in fact, has been immediately considered a movie of the modernity and it shows us screens used as showcases, entrance doors of the place in which the plots develops but, overall, separation in character’s gaze because inside of the hotel they always watch through mirrors or glasses, symbols of their world full of lies and deceptions.

Keywords

Alessandro Blasetti, Cinema and Te City, Screen, Urban Space

Introduction “[Cinema is] the place par excellence of the new collective rituals because it appears as a "temple" erected for new modern sensibility, communication form in which questions instilled in the modern society may fnd symbolic and real acceptance.” (Canudo: 1908) Alessandro Blasetti (Rome, 1900–1987) is one of the most important flmmakers of the Tirties in our cinematic landscape, he was also active in the feld of flm critics and of cultural policies, always demonstrating competence and passion. In 1937 Blasetti shot Contessa di Parma with the production company Industrie Cinematografche Italiane in Turin. Tis movie is one of the Italian examples of that period where joined the model of the celebration of "modernity" within the urban context. As we all know, the city is characterized as a privileged space in the cinema since its inceptions. "Te temple of the modern", as defned by the flm historian and theorist Ricciotto Canudo (Gioia del Colle, 1877 – Paris, 1923) in an early assay, establishes a reciprocal relationship with the city in two directions. Te frst one concerns the way urban space hosts projections, buildings and images of cinema while the second one deals with the way city has been elected as the ideal location to build their own plots, up to fx a model in the 1

collective imaginary. City and its attractions are therefore the geographical space of modernity and cinema was able to adhere to the needs of his time. In fact, just the representation of urban reality - and sometimes, by contrast, of the country - has been one of the central themes in flm history; although this dichotomy already belonged to other forms of expression (theatre, literature e.g.). In this way, cinema in Twentieth century has assumed the role of new medium of communication for the masses and city became its own space, linking cinema and architecture, as Marco Bertozzi afrms concerning the early age cinema: “Te urban imaginary in early cinema falls into that feeting boundaries mapping marked by the combination of the art of cinema and of the one of architecture: territories that make uncertain the scientifc importance, moors traversable with slow transportation, browsing, sifting, straying in fascinating and sometimes inhospitable ravines” (Bertozzi: 2001, p. 13; author’s translation).

The city of Turin Contessa di Parma can be classifed under the genre of the sophisticated comedy, inspired by the style of American flmmakers as Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra or George Cukor. Indeed the feature of the levity, typical of the frivolous comedy, should be connected to the desire of underling the diference between Contessa and the other Blasetti’s operas, normally characterized by discussion of social issues as, for instance, 1860 (1934), the controversial Vecchia guardia (1935) or the following Quattro passi tra le nuvole (1942). Blasetti defned this movie “silly” but his gaze has given us an important witness of the reality of places where he shot and of social conditions at the time, with a tribute to the American myth (Zagarrio, 2004, p. 180). Interior scenes are all shot into FERT Cinematographic Studios (the historical venue was located in Lombardia Course 194), where Blasetti returned in 1941 in occasion of his new flm La corona di ferro produced by Lux (Gambarotta, 2003, p. 249).

Fig. n. 1 – Te set at FERT Cinematographic Studios.

A short tale of that moments can be provided by the reminds of Enrico Paulucci (Genova, 1901 – Turin, 1999) who worked on the set of the movie: “In those years Turin was a laboratory city. It was also a hectic construction site, the town of radio and fashion, of Juventus and of the city center restructuring. We shot this flm into Fert, where the warehouses were full of treasures, full of false things”. (Prono: 2001, p. 201; author’s translation) 2

On this topic, Prono (2001, p. 202) describes us the places where outdoor scenes has been shot so that some locations of the town can be recognized: •

• •

•

• •

Mirafori Hippodrome (demolished in 1958, it had occupied the area bounded by Soviet Union, Traiano, Benedetto Croce and Onorato Vigliani Courses);

Valentino Park (located along Po river with longitudinal development, it branches of from Vittorio Emanuele II Course); Stadium (Municipal Stadium Pozzo - already known as Benito Mussolini Stadium - has been inaugurated in 1934 and demolished in 1990. Nowadays it is called Olympic Stadium and it has been restored in occasion of Winter Games 2006, it is located in Filadelfa Street but the main entrance is on the new Grande Torino Square);

Porta Nuova Railway Station (the most important station of the city, designed and completed by the architect Alessandro Mazzucchetti in 1868, it is located in the city center and its main entrance is on Vittorio Emanuele II Course); Viotti Street (a short street in the city center with arcades only on one side);

Giovanni Agnelli Course (an avenue on the south-eastern suburb where Fiat factory is located, in fact it is titled in honor of its founder); other city center streets.

I have insisted in placing geographically the locations of the shootings because the choice on them has not been by chance. Te urban imaginary proposed by cinema is a net made by routes and connections. Te contemporary concept of “Citynet”, namely a “reticular space […], an union that creates an indistinct organism between city and the Net” and “a space created by new connections, but also created by the expansion of the computerization of objects and of architectures phenomenon” (Arcagni: 2012, p. 13; author’s translation), as defned by Simone Arcagni in his recent assay Screen City, in my opinion can be considered an evolution of the Tirties dimension proposed in Blasetti’s movie. Te Citynet built by Contessa scenary, in fact, is a world technologically and culturally advanced. Te places of modernity, in which Blasetti set his characters, are all connected by new transportation, as car and train, or as telephone and papers when data are concerned. Tey continuously move themselves and information they generate on the whole urban area. According to Zagarrio, the movie “is an important clue of a desire for ‘modernity’ ” (Zagarrio: 2004, p. 182; author’s translation), thus it takes possession of the urban architectural signs: the stadium is a big concrete structure, which fgured through geometric shapes flls the screen with aesthetic purposes. With a similar aim we fnd the hippodrome: a big place that can gather large crowds for the football match or any other sport event, because the urban space is the space of masses phenomena. In Porta Nuova tourists and workers arrive, taking shape as the real gate of the city and becoming a silent spectator of frst migration fows: “when departures and arrivals of the Grand Tour has been concluded, in the Twentieth century Porta Nuova becomes the crossroads for thousands of Piedmont commuters that moved from country to the city” (Andreini: 2006, p. 125; author’s translation), in the ambition to become a city of landing. Urban and modern way of life has been celebrated here in the city center streets, full of shops and showcases where liberated women walk, buy or, more simply, look. Obviously, the counterpart of the built space is nature and within the urban space it is represented by parks, as Valentino, one of the postcard images of Turin. Ogling on that A Sunday afternoon on the island of la Grande-Jatte in the French environment, very pleasing to Turin citizens. Outside the perimeter there are Avigliana in Susa Valley and Sestriere: holiday destinations of a rich working class who starts designing and building the places where to go and have fun. In the case of Sestriere, the small town is characterized by towers designed by architect Vittorio Bonadè Bottino (Torino, 1889–979) under a commission of Giovanni Agnelli in 1930 and still used as hotels: the FIAT-mountainside of the FIAT-city. 3

We cannot forget that Italian cinema has born in Turin and besides this town has always been considered a laboratory of experiences and new technologies, the city of science and technique, of culture and progress. In conclusion of this chapter, if we can assimilate the town of Contessa to the actual term of “Smart city”, we should also consider that Piedmont chief town remained anchored to its baroque-noble structure over having been later projected under migration of countryside masses, for whom religion and tradition rules prevail on human decisions.

Screens, glasses and mirrors as diaphragms In Contessa di Parma, vision is often realized through screens, mirrors or glasses in function of diaphragms between gaze and fction, truth and deception. During the development of the plot we fnd screens as showcases of the shops in the city center street where the mannequin Marcella (Elisa Cegani), the false countess, walks meeting the football player Gino Vanni (Antonio Centa). In this occasion we see the portion of city life through another fctive framework: the arcades of Viotti Street. Showcases are the screen in which clothes are shown, namely the objects of Contessa environment, since that entire story runs across a fashion label. Te Grand Hotel entrance, the place where high society fellows live and meet for social events, is a revolving door made of glass panels. Tis door here assumes the symbolic function of threshold between the public city and the private space where only important people can have access. Te protected inner place is a kind of “gated community” as Arcagni writes about the new architectural assets of American metropolis in which the “ecology of fears” developed (Arcagni: 2010, p. 60; author’s translation). Climbing the stairs of the hotel, we reach widow Marta Rossi (Pina Gallini) room where we fnd the screen that hides Marcella changing her outft. Te same aim of both hiding and separation is represented by the sliding doors in the director Cerrani (Umberto Melnati) studio during the parade rehearsal. Sliding panels are also used in the theater foor in Sestriere, where the fnal parade takes place, creating a performance into the cinematic screen with a horizontal movement. Parade, in this way, is confgured as a representation in the representation. As well focused by Eugeni, “Blasetti metropolis is then basically a theater stage” (Eugeni: 2007, p. 134; author’s translation). In his assay the scholar argues that in this flm daily life is a representation for continuous fctions in identities but also because, under the aspect we mind more, “the city is seen and represented then with the mobile, unstable, precarious eye of cinema” (Eugeni: 2007, p. 132; author’s translation): story develops through a continuous game of screens that build the net in the city and open new scenarios. Besides, in this movie Blasetti shot several takes concerning the car during which the dialogues, especially between Mr. Vanni and other characters, take place through windows. In Contessa there is a “performed and repeated use of car windows to crop the faces of the protagonists” (Eugeni: 2007, p. 133; author’s translation). To the fascination of screens and of the image of the city they give us back also belong car windows, as noticed by Arcagni. New soft screens substitute heavy and framed ones, so they ft into the architectural and daily objects, they merge into architecture and share the space with cars windows, mirrors, glass (Arcagni: 2012, pp. 82-83). Tere are other occasions in which we see car travelling or we look directly inside of them or, besides, we see the landscape with a subjective take through the window. Achieving a “travelling gaze”: the cartographic view of the city. Concerning the mirrors, one is located into Gino Vanni’s room and we see his image refected inside when he stops pretending to be ill and takes the decision to go out looking for the “countess” Marcella. Deceptions, representations and pretences, in fact, are the foundations of the whole story of Contessa since that from the title we have a fake information: Contessa di Parma is the name of a dress and is not referred to the noble title of the women who wears it! 4

Cinematographic symbolic representation realizes this condition sharing the two faces of the sphere. In one side there is the truth, the progress, the modernity, normal people and in the other side the deceptions, high society fellows, the narrow lows of always. Te dance into Grand Hotel scene shows us the “other world over the glass modular panels” made by encounters, relationships, dances: the city life of high society. Finally, in Contessa the screen intended as a picture is represented with various paintings (in Gino’s house or in the director’s studio, for instance) and with posters and afches in the hall of the theater; while the screen as a communicative instance is present in the form of display with trains information and in Gino’s watch. In order to highlight the feature of city of progress and technique, in Contessa large space has been reserved to communication system: telephone is inserted as a tool of modern age easily managed by all the characters and also the paper messages are delivered with a certain quickness. Moreover, visual communication and the organization of social events (dance nights or parades) play an important role within the advertising campaign of the fashion factory Magazzini Primavera. Trough a new mass medial system, a factory of dreams, and of “appearance”, made by money and business has been created in this period of time (Grande: 2003, p. 191).

Contessa into a screencity If Casetti afrmed that "landscape [...] has now become a media landscape” (Casetti: 2008, p. 38; author’s translation), in urban place we cannot distinguish architectures of buildings from architectures of images. An important pattern of this is well shown in the photographs by Michael Wolf within “Architecture of density” series, taken in Hong Kong, where picture is a set of modules in which each window of the building, vertically organized, can be assimilated to the bit fow.

Fig. n. 2 – A pattern of Architecture of Density by Michael Wolf.

Is always more relevant crossing shapes and disciplines to understand cinema and the representation it gave of the city. Image of the city is a “hybrid object” as defned by Bertozzi (2001, p. 13) such as cinema is. Each movie creates a universe, a set of linked elements, real or symbolic, aimed to fx an imaginary in spectators. In the same way, city behaves “because image development is a reciprocal process between observer and thing observed, it is possible to enhance the image through symbolic artifces, through the re-education of the perceiver or through the reconstruction of his environment” (Lynch: 2006, p. 33; author’s translation). Spatial contiguity is fctional, it is created in function of the imaginary dimension of the specifc flm and of what it aims to express. According to the study presented by Erich Rohmer on the space in Murnau’s Faust (1926) in which the French flmmaker classifed it in three notions, we can assert that moving images

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representing the architectural space, that acquires meaning in the portion of exposed flm, becomes flmic space. Besides, as we know, in Rohmer thesis space is composed also by pictorial one (Rohmer: 2001, p. 19). Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (Bielefeld: 1888 – Santa Barbara: 1931) did not use pictorial direct quotes within his operas but he built every single frame as a picture, controlling carefully all the details of the image. Blasetti seems to have learnt this lesson – moreover, several takes inspired by Sunrise (1927) in Contessa can be found - demonstrating his taste for aesthetic (mainly composing the picture by circular lines) and for visual arts especially. In fact, this topic has been dealt during the conference organized by FAI and held in December 2012 in Milan titled “Avanguardie artistiche e scenografche moderne nel cinema italiano degli anni Trenta. Il caso de La contessa di Parma di Alessandro Blasetti (1937)” in which Rafaele De Berti stresses the visual research implemented in the movie: “In the Tirties Italian cinema is possible to identify a series of flms in which we see the adoption of a modern and close to the contemporary international avant-garde from Bauhaus Constructivism to Rationalism scenography. Tis is due to the collaboration of designers as the architects and painters such as Guido Fiorini, Virgilio Marchi, Vinicio Paladini, Enrico Paulucci, Carlo Enrico Rava or by a capable professional as Gastone Medin”. (De Berti: 2013; author’s translation) Particular importance for the study here presented is provided by the graphic signs designed by Paulucci for the headlines where graphics, architecture and cinema come together. As asserted by the professor: “Note the original opening sequence of Enrico Paulucci head titles with stylized shots of rationalist buildings” (De Berti: 2013; author’s transaltion). Actually, Paulucci’s head titles became part of the architecture itself, as they defne formal lines and take part of the building framework, highlighting the perspective.

Fig. n.3 – Enrico Paulucci’s headlines.

Conclusions In order to keep itself alive, cinema regains the role of its early age: representing the city and confronting with its phenomena, expressing and developing in the inner space. In a time like ours, in which intersections and exchanges into disciplines are promoted, here is that the city provides the basis for a truly interdisciplinary relationship. Cinema, paintings, architecture, sociology, advertising, photography, communication, performing arts and city planning achieve a broad and comprehensive design into the urban space of Tird millennium.

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As Contessa di Parma is a case of mirrors and glasses, the portion of space imprisoned by the rectangle of the screen can be replied to infnity and creating infnitives recalls, fnally they can augment reality. Te staged spectacle inside the movie is the big city made by screens and by technological and audiovisual spectacle that we use to stare in our digital era. Always closer to an entertainment park or a multiplex. Cinema is relocated in the city (Arcagni: 2010, p. 40) placing itself in devices made available by contemporary metropolis, geographical and planned shape of post-modern urban space.

Bibliography Andreini, A., (ed.), (2006), Una Mole di parole. Passeggiate nella Torino degli scrittori, Turin: Celid. Arcagni, S., (2012), Screen City, Rome: Bulzoni. Arcagni, S., (2010), Oltre il cinema. Metropoli e media, Turin: Kaplan. Bertozzi, M., (2001), L’immaginario urbano nel cinema delle origini, Bologna: Clueb. Casetti, F., (2008), “L’esperienza flmica e la ri-locazione del cinema”, Fata Morgana, No. 4. Della Casa, S., Prono, F., (eds.), (2006), Contessa di Parma. La modernità a Torino negli anni Trenta, Proceedings of the Conference Contessa di Parma – Una commedia nella Torino degli anni Trenta, Turin, Italy, 6 october 2005. Eugeni, R., (2007), La metropoli tra set e palcoscenico. Figure della città nel cinema italiano degli anni Trenta, in Marrone, G., Pezzini, I. (ed.), Senso e metropoli. Per una semiotica posturbana, Rome: Meltemi. Gambarotta, B., et al., (eds.), (2004), Torino Il grande libro della città. Storia urbana, arte, musica e spettacolo, vol. 2, Turin: La Stampa. Grande, M., (2003 [1992]), Le commedie degli anni Trenta, in Id., Caldiron, O., (ed.), La commedia all’italiana, Rome: Bulzoni. Lynch, K., ([1964] 2006), L’immagine della città, Venice: Marsilio. Prono, F., et al., (eds.), (2001), Torino città del cinema, Milan: Il Castoro. Rohmer, E., ([1984] 2001), L’organizzazione dello spazio nel Faust di Murnau, Venice: Marsilio. Zagarrio, V., (2004), La contessa e il marinaio, in Id., Cinema e fascismo. Film, modelli e immaginari, Venice: Marsilio. Form on Contessa di Parma at the Documentation Centre on architectural culture and its history http://www.architettiroma.it/archivarch/scheda_flm.asp?id_flm=28 [retrieved 30.08.2013]. Conference on Contessa di Parma at the FAI http://www.fondoambiente.it/upload/oggetti/De%20Berti.pdf [retrieved 30.08.2013]. Form on Contessa di Parma at the IMDB http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028740/releaseinfo?ref_=tt_dt_dt [retrieved 29.08.2013]. Form on Contessa di Parma at the Enciclopedia del cinema in Piemonte http://www.torinocittadelcinema.it/schedaflm.php?flm_id=24 [retrieved 29.08.2013]. Historical FERT site http://www.fertstorica.it/index2.html [retrieved 29.08.2013]. Michael Wolf personal webpage http://photomichaelwolf.com [retrieved 30.08.2013]. Museo Torino site http://www.museotorino.it/site [retrieved 29.08.2013].

Biography Ornella Castiglione (Turin, Italy, 1973) has a master degree in Sciences of spectacle at Milan State University with a thesis titled “Te bitter tears of Petra von Kant between cinema and theatre”. Currently she is adjunct professor of Cinema and visual arts at University of Milan-Bicocca and collaborates with Politecnico of Milan and of Turin dealing with Communication Techniques. Her topics are cinema related with other disciplines, movies representing urban space and didactics of cinema. 7

PHOTOSENSITIVE ARCHITECTURE THE LUMINOUS LANDSCAPES OF COMPUTERS AND SCREENS ANNA BARBARA Politecnico di Milano, Scuola di Architettura e Società, Polo territoriale di Piacenza [email protected]

Abstract

Te use of screens for a large amount of activities during the day and the night has defnitely changed our relationship with the places, both in terms of space, brightness, both in terms of time. Te lighted city and internet enable us to be productive 24 hours for day and then force the circadian rhythms of our day into new temporal typologies (chronotypes) whose characteristics are to be still explored. Te architecture lighted by screens wants to be a productive, confdent, animated, safe. Beyond the transformation that the screens are introducing in the image of the contemporary city, it is also interesting to analyze how screenscapes are changing the buildings in terms of facades, but also of interiors. It begins with the entry of other monitors in the home that the centrality of the TV has multiplied. Te increase of presence of the screens multiplies the points of attraction creating new centres indoor. From this point of view the main places that reveals an interesting relationship between the screens (computer, TV, etc..) and space/time are: the ofces (half-private); the places of passage (half-public) -mentioning Walter Benjamin's passages- and the waiting rooms.

Keywords

Architecture, Chronotypes, Interiors, Screen, Senses, Times

Screen-façade Te presence of computers and screens are also transforming our more traditional architecture both inside and outside. Te impact of the screens on the facade of the building does not change only the urban lightscape (during the day, but even more at night), but also the relationship between facade and interior in terms of: lighting, in terms of message, in terms of rhythms. Te façade that, in the greatest tradition of architecture, was born as a perfect transposition of the plan, to became its storyteller, to represent in vertical its style, meaning and function, has now become more like a video for advertising, an information map, an extra-story with a life completely independent from the building itself. Tis mutation of their relationship is one of the most interesting paradox left to us by the XX century.

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Without going back far to Venturi-Scott-Brown, when they described in Learning from Las Vegas a city night scene of shows and entertainment, and they took for granted that the same city, during the day, would have existed almost exclusively as the backstage of the other. We could recognize that today, the change was not so radical, but sometime even more complex and intriguing: dramatization is not relegated only to the night hours, but often to verbose screens that transform whole parts of the city in cacophony of sound and images, as well Rem Koolhaas describes in “Junk Space”. Screens are no longer relegated to the front side of the building, but they are skins, technological surfaces, vertical cityscapes in continuous movement. Te architecture, which was a tectonic reference in the city of the XX century, loses another piece of fxity with the difusion of the facades with screens. To the design of the forms of space is reached the design of the shapes of the time. Trough the mediaskin program, that introduce dynamic elements in the static architecture, passes one of the possible ways of designing time-based architecture. In the last century were the camera, the train, the car to increase the dynamism of the bodies inside the town, adding to the mobility of the observer also the architecture, both immersed in the same reference system. Te observer of the fourth dimension (time) in the XXI century is not only passive spectator but he takes part to the large projection in urban scenarios, being himself sometimes protagonist or manipulator of the show. From the sensitivity of one of the frst digital buildings of architectural history, the Tower of Wind by Toyo Ito, we arrived at adulteration by Asymptote architects, where the façade becomes digital matrix able to shape, to bend, to redesign the building, the urban space around it, but also to engage the interior, as they did for the GVM, or the "3-D Trading Floor" for the New York Stock Exchange in Wall Street.

New chronotypes Te ever-lighted architecture, where the screens lit at all times, designs the city of the non-stop time, open 24 hours per day. Te variable of time is extremely important, because the rhythms of the screen are fne tuned with the ones of the city on the move. As much as the communication times of the messages projected on the screens are perfectly attuned to the times of the transportations (bike, bus, car, subway...), or pedestrians, the more the message is reached. Tey are not commensurate to the static city but the dynamic one, at the speed of its fuxes, at the cadence of its rhythms. Te sequence of the images on the screens is a plausible measure of urban times, if not the driver to fow the information at the same speed of the people. Te more easy image, even if it refers to an analogical world, is the one in which the screens are like small gears, inside a clock complex as the city, to tune the diferent speeds. In this urban geography, grow up new forms of time, and therefore new types of architecture whose matrix is temporal rather than spatial. In a recent publication1 I tried to explore these types of chronotypes, and some have emerged strongly related to this subject. Te chronotypes are architectural "types" whose matrix is not formal, but temporal. Te relationship between screens and architecture creates contemporary chronotypes like: •

cararchitecture (which is a translation of a terms used by the architect Zaha Hadid) which is in the relationship between the speed of transportation, the shape and the information of the screens on the buildings. Tis relationship arises from the fact that the fows around the building all have diferent speeds. Te perception that one has of a building observed at 4 km/h is diferent from that at 40 km/h. Te message on the screen tunes to a main speed, or depending on the time of day on one

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•

•

•

rather than another. Te chronotype is the result of an algorithm linked to the movement of a point on a line rather than at a fxed point;

intermodal regards the interchanging nodes where the screens are not only information and advertising. Te chronotype intermodal uses various performances of the screen: the hypnotic power of the pulsating light for advertising; the signal value of the information that often is functional to the distribution of the fows; the ability to slow down or speed up the individual speeds in the transition from one mode of transport to another; media skins in architecture that replace the building envelope with a big continuous screen or sometime that create new shape of the building itself. Many media skin host art installations or interaction with an audience present or distant communicating and amplifying the magnitudo of the efect;

branded, which sees the skin as the advertising page of a magazine in which the screens are the perennial celebration of the brand hosted into the building. Tey are advertising screens that we have always known, but which became, thanks to the degree of resolution of the LEDs, giant televisions at the scale of the buildings/squares/infrastructures. Te time of the advertisement that fows is the one of a stop waiting, a red light.

Screenscapes indoor Beyond the transformation that the screens are introducing in the image of the contemporary city, it is also interesting to analyze the screenscaper inside the buildings. It began with the presence of screens within the buildings through the last 50 years of architecture, with the entrance in the '50s and '60s of the TV and introduced a new "fre" in bourgeois homes. Te TV revolutionized extremely spaces, furnishings and symbolic hierarchies into the residential architecture of that time: the main chair was no longer in front of the freplace, but facing the TV, as well as the living room was not around the tea-table, but directed to the new pole animated by television. With the entry of other monitors in the home the centrality of the TV has multiplied. Te spread of projectors and screens increases today the points of attraction creating new poles both indoors and outdoors. • • •

Te screens inside the housing are placed in various ways:as paintings hanging on the wall, i.e. as static surface in a point to ofer the show (so were the frst monitors ... instead of the freplace); as audio/visual attractor, in its performance always ON, and therefore capable of directing the interior according to a geometry of "visibility" of the screen and its contents; as a generator of space, composing new ways of living, changing the architecture itself.

Tey are the new protagonists, able to open new “windows” on other places, to light the scape of the house with new performances, to become independent from the electric range and to disconnect the monitor from the perimeter walls, standing everywhere. Te geometric-symbolic relationship between the sofa and the TV is so iconic that it resurrected recently by Future System with a SOFA in memory of Jan Kaplicky, where a large bed/sofa -reminiscent of the Roman triclinium - has a circular shape, at the center a small navel-table to allow to see 360 ° a small TV included into the sofa.

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Physiological mutations Te XX century had raised the issue of transparency at the heart of research in the interior spaces. Te century of desired and reached hygiene had placed natural light as an inalienable right for the living spaces. Healthy was synonymous with lighted space and the quality of the places was assessed by this parameter. Even the places of the privacy had been unable to hide behind curtains and veils, but they had to accept the entry of light as guaranty of cleaning. Te XX century had taken away the darkness even at night, lighting up with electricity the darkest areas of the city. But remove the natural light or otherwise lower the brightness is causing a progressive time dis-perception, a continuous distortion of circadian and natural rhythms, an input in a fuid time dimension that can start and fnish when you want. Te screen comes in bright lightscape of the city and of architecture as a bright pixel, able to inform, enlighten, but also to alter the physiological rhythms of our body. Te most recent applied physiology reveals that the light emission of the screens keeps the body in a state of unnatural sleep-wake cycles. Te places under the light of the screens even at night live a kind of "forced awakening" as it is deduced from the path of the electroencephalogram, but also by the eye movements much more similar to daylight hours than at night. A change in melatonin levels that, if you live in a daylight screens, do not have the natural increase as it is usually in the case of night shifts, for working or because of jet-lag. Te main places that reveals an interesting relationship between screens (computer, TV, etc.) and spaces are: the ofces and workplaces 2.0 and the places of waiting or passage (mentioning Walter Benjamin's “passages”).

Workplaces 2.0 Te ofces of the most important companies in the digital sector 2.0 are becoming perhaps the most interesting points of view to study the new screenscape in interior architecture. Tese places, now less and less tied to traditional hierarchies and geometries, mix productivity and research, live and work, study and recreation. Te spaces are informal and open to have the characteristic of being always connected with the outside world and with the next network of collaborators. Tese qualities create the hybrid and complex spaces, both from the point of view of privacy, of concentration, of needs of light and darkness, of silence and collaborative dialogue. One of the simplest issue raised by the presence of the screens in our architecture is therefore the management of the diferent degrees of darkness ranging from natural open air light to the closed darkness. Although the most advanced technologies of digital are able to ofer high performance even in bright sunlight, it is undeniable that the digital world achieves the best efects in bright twilight and darkness. Te best performances of the screens, takes place in dim light and in a relationship of shading from direct natural light. In short, we use computers in ofces almost dark, preferably with difuse light. For this reason (and not only) the ofces in the recent architectural production have incredible transparent and bright open space for socializing, and shadowy spaces scattered by cabs to work at computer. Interesting examples are: the Microsoft headquarters in Wien, designed by Innocad, where natural light is always fltered and is never used for lighting function, but rather psychological; or the ofces of Google Camenzind Evolution in Stockholm and Zurich; the Facebook ofces, by O + A, Palo Alto, 2009; AOL ofces, by Studio O + A, Palo Alto, 2010; BBC Worldwide's ofces, by Toughtspace, Sydney, 2010.

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Waiting rooms and passages Such as the ofces 2.0, also the passing and interchange places become extremely important because they are usually fow channels for acceleration or deceleration. Te presence of screens is usually functional to motion and not only to the message that is transmitted. It is referred to the subway stations, or the waiting rooms, as well as to the long underground passages or treadmill or escalators. Usually these places are manned from advertising, but also lend themselves to interesting experiments in art and design. To mention two examples installations: Travelogues by architects Diller and Scofdio and Civilization (Megaplex) by artist Marco Brambilla. Travelogues was an installation inside the anonymous corridors of JFK airport in New York. Defned by a one-direction movement, the corridor hosts a series of screens (made in collaboration with Tom Brigham) that comprises thirty-three backlit lenticular screens evenly spaced along the 1800 linear feet of corridors of the International Arrivals Building. Each screen holds one second of action, animated by the speed of the moving viewer. Te sequence of screens creates a sort of micro-movie: the spaces between screens form time lapses. Each set of panels tells a short fction about an anonymous traveler via the suitcase they carry. Te cases are x-rayed and contents materialize to trigger a fashback of a travel experience. Te movement of passengers becomes thus pro-active with respect to the sequence of screens engendering an interesting interaction on content, on time and space. Civilization is also a very interesting project, because it is a video installation inside the elevators of Te Standard hotel Chelsea in New York. Te video installation has its narration, which however is emphasized by the movement of the lift. Te video is inspired by Dante's Divina Commedia and according to the movement, upward or downward, goes to Heaven or to Hell. In this case the narration of the screen flls a moment of non-sense, through a narrative assisted by the movement: the observer moves, the narrative video and the display move too. Te relationship between space and time that is established through video installations is the subject of research conducted by Daniel Birnbaum in the book Cronologia. Tempo e identità nei flm e nei video degli artisti contemporanei 2, which explores the experience of time as experience rather than as a way. In this panorama emerges, from the building, the absence of any trace of memory: the “screenscape” is a world turned on perennial present, which instead could build an interesting dialogue with the pre-existing, with the history, without necessarily deny it, neither abolish it. It is therefore begin to consider the experience of screenscapes, not only about the content being projected, but about their performances as dynamic light sources, such as watches capable of scanning rhythms of living and creating, as new actors of architecture that can reformulate space and times. Te contribution of the diferent times on the space is perhaps one of the most challenging design problems for the architects of the future. Design the forms of time, and not only the forms of space, acquiring those new tools and scenarios that media technologies make increasingly available, it will be a mandatory task.

Bibliography Augé, M., (1993), Nonluoghi: introduzione a una antropologia della surmodernità, Milan: Eleuthera. Barbara, A., (2011), Storie di architettura attraverso i sensi, Milan: Postmediabooks. Barbara, A., (2012), Sensi, tempo e architettura, Milan: Postmediabooks. Benjamin, W., (2000), I passaggi di Parigi, Vol. IX, Turin: Einaudi. 5

Birnbaum, D., (2007), Cronologia. Tempo e identità nei flm e nei video degli artisti contemporanei, Milan: Postmediabooks. Deleuze, G., (1989), L’immagine-tempo, Milan: Ubulibri. Flink, J., (2000), Te Automobile Age, Cambridge: MA: MIT Press. Gausa, M., (2010), Espacio Tiempo Información, Barcelona: Actar. Gwiazdzinski, L., (2003), La Ville 24 heures sur 24, Grenoble: editions de l’aube datar. Harvey, D., (2000), Between Space and Time:Rrefections of Ggeographical Imagination, Berkeley: Berkeley University Press. Koolhaas, R., (2006), Junkspace, Macerata: Quodlibet. Leupen, B., Heijne, R., Van Zwol, J., (2005), Time-Based Architecture, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Palumbo, M. L., (2012), Paesaggi sensibili, Palermo: Duepunti Edizioni. Sacchi, L., Unali M., (2003), Architettura e cultura digitale, Milan: Skira. Virilio, P., (2000), La bomba informatica, Milan: Cortina.

Biography Anna Barbara. Researcher in architecture and design, 1968. Graduated in Architecture at Polithecnic of Milan. From the 1998 to 2001 she lived between Italy and Asia. She has been visiting professor at Kookmin University in the Architecture, Design and Interior Design faculties and professor at the Techno Brain Master 21 at Seoul (South Korea). In the 2000 she won the Canon Foundation Fellowship for making a research at Hosei University Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning in Tokyo ( Japan) on the relationship between architecture and senses. Actually she is researcher in Architecture Design at Politecnico di Milano in the School of Architettura e Società, campus Piacenza. She was visiting lecturer in many international faculties of Architecture and Design in United States, Korea, Japan, Philippines, Brazil, Emirates, Jordan, etc. She is co-founder with Luca Molinari of VIAPIRANESI srl.

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A. Barbara, Sensi, Tempo e Architettura, Milan: Postmediabooks, 2012.

2

Italian version translated by Postmediabooks, (Milan: 2007).

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MAXXI TV, A PUBLIC MEDIA ART THAT INTERFACES WITH THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE MUSEUM ALEXANDRO LADAGA & SILVIA MANTEIGA ELASTIC Group of Artistic Research [email protected]

Abstract

MAXXI TV is a monumental television, a MAXI television. A Public Art that observes the public and the museum, a large electronic eye that absorbs architecture. As in a picture-crystal, the viewer becomes the work created by the cyclopean eye look. Te work was conceived (also as regards its overall dimensions) in order to be fexibly inserted in diferent locations of the outer area of the Museum MAXXI in Rome nevertheless the area in front of the "periscope" is the site most efective from the point of view of contextualization and dialogue of the work with the architecture that hosts. For this reason, the giant TV should "observe" the museum where the museum is overlooking the city and the public, making the square a public lounge, a visual net-work, a screen city place.

Keywords

Digital Space, Electronic Media, Environment, Media City, Museography, Participatory Art Practices, Screen Media, Smart City

The Electronic Civilization: a screen city "topos", an “environment mental space” In mathematics "topos" is a type of category that behaves like the category of sheaves of sets on a topological space, on a "site", a point set localization. Right from its birth, the electronic device proved to be not only a physical space rather a mental space that was able to make what was private, public. Te works of earlier practitioners of participatory art as Bruce Nauman's walks around his studio in Going Around the Corner Pieces with Live and Taped Monitors, (1970) and Vito Acconci's stream of consciousness are spatial performance works that are at the genetic origin of video installations; pieces of art in which the body becomes an instrument for measuring space. Te space of the electronic image in a screen city culture is a place, a "topos", in which the value of the depth of feld is lost in favour of the surface of the image, where outside and inside become one and the same, where even the representation of the human body is an image. Te electronic image, more than any other medium, has been able to represent space without confnes, fuid and in motion but also the inner space, the mental space of the brain: the "space of the vision". In fact, for Andy Warhol television is the art universe: a journey through the artist's obsessions. Andy Warhol had always been fascinated by television as a medium of communication that was contemporary and massive; an ideal tool for the broadcast of artistic ideas and images. It was his big 1

dream to have his own television show. As early as 1964 he made an imitation soap opera, to which he added real "adverts", and at the beginning of the 70s, he produced soap operas that were the refection of his aesthetic and fantastical universe. In the 60's, another pioneer, Nam June Paik, began to explore video space; the suggestions of the Fluxus group give birth in him the idea of video installation that becomes a reality in its frst solo show in Wuppertal Exposition of Music - Electronic television (1963). For Paik the medium of television is the totem of the video; is the centerpiece, the performance that creates space around him, as in TV Buddha (1974) and Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984) where dialogue between the observer and the observed generates the space of video installation. And what better that a monumental machine of vision, an extra large Monitor TV, an oversized computer screen, to represent the way the totem machine looks at the public? Te "eye of the machine" that looks at the Museum is the totem of new space generated electronically, but... the electronic eye device, how it works? What relationship establishes with the viewer and with the space? Te answer is that the electronic eye generates an environment mental space. An environmental space as in “When Buildings Melt Into Air & Te Air Re-forms Into Buildings” (Acconci: 2012) a public art in which the camera view-point circles the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, one circle after another. With each circling, one building after another separates into a screen of pixels; each successive screen, one in front of the other, holds bigger & bigger pixels until all the buildings of the square are gradually dissolved.

The power of the grid and “connectedness” MAXXI TV – the giant eye of the TV- is the Project of Public Art that we have planned for the MAXXI – National Museum of the XXI Century Arts in Rome 2% Public Art Contest. In this project, the giant eye of the TV generates a variable and multiple, elastic space. MAXXI TV is a Public Media Art that interfaces with the architecture of the Museum designed by Zaha Hadid. Tis giant TV is a "space skin"; a communication space with the outside arena, and therefore an exteriorization of the inside that records and register, the amniotic space that is the public sphere, a "mediatic belly". Alicia Imperiale (2000) states that surfaces are like an interface between two osmotic, communicating spaces, deep surfaces that can undergo a meta-video-morphosis, a transfguration of their communicative capacity. Te surface as a computer screen or a video screen is the fnal layer with which two opposing spaces can interface; it is the layer on which information fows. A surface screen on which new, ephemeral, virtual, deep architecture is projected, constructed from a palimpsest of layers in motion; and that because, according with Juan Downey pioneering theories in the 70's, Public Art is a matter of environmental mass communications. Cinema is linear continuity, a one-dimensional vision of space and surfaces. But video is dynamism of lines in continuous metamorphosis; it is simultaneous, profound. Video is an expanded, dilated space because the spatial quality of the video image is reticular: a "grid space", an interconnected system; and the "space of the grid" provides the framework of concepts such open/closed sets, continuity, interior/exterior, boundary and limit points; and specially the notion of "connectedness", an "hyperconnected space".

Kinetic city: the new media image space Modern macrostructures are kinetic spaces in which images generated by new technological media creates information fows that are translated into visual networks. Digital technology has the alchemic capacity to transform any surface into "image space". Te new media are able to expand perceived and represented space; they can change it, making it become an extendible structure, a hyper-surface. Te video image can reach impossible spaces, relative environments, contracted spaces; it can simultaneously be transmitted via satellite 2

or via networks in diferent spaces thanks to the power of transmission and real time, live transmission, which can generate the desired wireless imagination of the futurists. Te speed of the video fow can contract spaces, simultaneously, creating windows in which the screen surface, the video skin, can be divided into multiple windows or can be expanded into a satellite atlas that monitors the territory in real time.

Point of view – observatory – perspective Te key to a new spatiality which will strengthen contemporary architecture lies in the big structure, in the big dimension, to use the words of Rem Koolhaas. Te visual impact of bigness, the elegy of largeness, can be seen in museums like Gehry's Guggenheim or Oldenburg's macro pop sculptures, but it can also be seen in the new maxi-screens which cover mediatic cities throughout the planet with their video skin or in the works of Public Video Art. A new perspective, from below up, requires a new monumentality to oppose daily banality. Te public video art installation Observatory, which we projected on the wall of the MUVIM Museum of Valencia (2001) played with this oversize scale relationship; in this case, an immense infrared eye transformed the pre-existing site, the monumental architecture of the museum, giving it an air of refecting meditation: this large eye staring out from the museum in Valencia is the eye of the museum, as it observes the spectators who come to visit it. Te space takes on life and becomes a point of view, an observatory. A Museum that sees!On MAXXI TV, the square, the space in front of the Museum, becomes a new media agora. MAXXI TV is a monumental television, a MAXI television. A Public Art that observes the public and the museum, a large electronic eye that absorbs architecture. As in a picture-crystal, the viewer becomes the work created by the cyclopean eye look. Te work was conceived (also as regards its overall dimensions) in order to be fexibly inserted in diferent locations of the outer area of the Museum MAXXI in Rome nevertheless the area in front of the "periscope" is the site most efective from the point of view of contextualization and dialogue of the work with the architecture that hosts. For this reason, the giant TV should "observe" the museum where the museum is overlooking the city and the public, making the square a public lounge, a visual net-work, a screen city place. Streaks over the structure of the monumental TV reinterpret in a kind of techno-mutation the zenithal view of the museum project. Te screen, thanks to the use of LED (Light Emitting Diode), reveals the structure of the video -the pixel- as well as the MAXXI Museum reveals the structure of its architecture. Te project MAXXI TV is planned as an expansion of the museum as it may temporarily house video festivals and exhibitions of media art and architecture. MAXXI TV is the natural evolution of another ELASTIC Group works of art as Tvision (2005), a website-specifc project, a work in progress which is carried out in the public space of the web, and Video Solo/ Video Contact (2003) -a series of video performances- where tv monitor is the head of both a virtual video creature and of a life performer. In the video performance Video Solo (a solo video performance of a man-machine; a TV man who is the physical forerunner of the small virtual being in TVision) we make an obvious reference to a “re-feshing” of technology; we take a stand for the importance of men and machines being together, like bodies touching, entering into contact. Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset spoke of the “deshumanizacion del arte” as a process begun in the twentieth century; now that we have passed into the new millennium, technology is instead clearly developing towards connective thought, towards the globalizing exchange of information without limits. And art must leave the hortus conclusus in which it has been trapped and follow this new path. Art must abandon its own limits in order to be widely grasped. Only in this way can it become public; as in the sacrifce of the virtual being in TVision, in which the monitor TV (it's head) becomes fnally the monument on a podium on a square or as in MAXXI TV where the monumental monitor TV becomes the observer of the Museum.

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Fig. n. 1 - MAXXI TV, Project of Public Art for MAXXI – National Museum of the XXI Century Arts in Rome, 2008

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Fig. n. 2 - MAXXI TV, Project of Public Art for MAXXI – National Museum of the XXI Century Arts in Rome, 2008

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Conclusions: MAXXI TV, a Virtual Space of Empathy, a Space for Participatory Connections By making McLuhan's philosophy his own, Paik understood what the role of the development of satellites on the global consciousness would be, and how its ability to synthesize in real time completely credible images, with the same veracity as any other televised image, would create an enormous new power to manipulate truth. He realized that the eventual union between computer, telecommunication technology and video would bring about what he called in 1974 the "electronic information highway." But other critics believe we must go back to 1952, when the revolutionary Lucio Fontana introduced his frst Concetti Spaziali for RAI TV's experimental transmission Manifesto Spaziale per la Televisione. TV can be seen as a space of the social sphere in an artistic way, a participatory way. How? Transforming the medium in the metaphor of a critical viewer, transforming the form, the surface, the container, in meaning, substance, concept. MAXXI TV is "the big eye", the metaphor of the new media space as a new media "agora", as the central spot of the screen city, MAXXI TV is a gathering place for interconnections. In MAXXI TV show, the viewers are the protagonists; they participate as observers in the great simulacrum of reality; they are involved in the spectacle of the vision machine and in the environmental space of the Museum as a topological space, a "site". Tey are linked to the notion of "localization" in a point-set topology. As in an aerial vision, MAXXI TV points the public: "you are here", now! MAXXI TV represents the point of “socialization of the mind” (Teilhard de Chardin: 1961), the smart city of “a thousand minds” (Soleri: 2002), the “dematerialized city”, the “invisible city” made of neural connections, made of “telepathy” (Downey: 1977) because “Tele-Vision” is the “Tele-Communication Medium”. It is a “far sight”: to see beyond. And MAXXI TV giant eye is an empathic far sight: the mirror experience of observing and refecting, all together, in the new media square of the Museum as Teatre, as a place for viewing.

Bibliography Acconci, V., (1993), Making Pubblic, Den Haag: Stroom. Ammer, M., (2009), Nam June Paik: Exposition of Music, Electronic Television, Revisited, Berlin: Buchhandlung Walther Konig, KG Abt. Verlag. Benhamou-Huet, J., Cirimele, A., (2009), Warhol TV, Paris: Les presses du réel. Downey, J., (1973), “Technology and Beyond”, Radical Software, Video and Environment, Vol. II, No. 5, 1973, pp.2-3 Downey, J., (1977), “Architecture, Video, Telepathy- a communication utopia”, Center for Advanced TV Studies, International Review of Video and Mass Media, Vol. 5, No.1, 1977, pp. 1-4. Gasparini, K., (2012), Schermi Urbani. Tecnologia e innovazione. Nuovi sistemi per le facciate mediatiche, Milan: Kluwer. Hanhardt, J. G., (2000), Te Worlds of Nam June Paik, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications. Imperiale A., 2000), New Flatness: Surface Tension in Digital Architecture, Zurich: Birkhauser. Ladaga, A., Manteiga, S., (2006), Strati Mobili: Video Contestuale in Arte e Architettura, Rome: Edilstampa. Manteiga Pousa, S. (1991), Te Enigma of Avant-Gardes, in Tymieniecka A.T. (eds) New Queries in Aesthetics and Metaphysics: Time, Historicity, Art, Culture, Metaphysics, the Transnatural, Analecta Husserliana, V. 37, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 213-217. Soleri, P., (2002), What If ? Collected Writings 1986-2000, Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books. Teilhard de Chardin, P., (1961), Te Phenomenon Of Man, New York: Harper Torchbooks.

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http://www.elasticgroup.com http://www.youtube.com/user/atelierelastic http://eng.tusciaelecta.it/2004-elastic-group http://www.elasticgroup.com/retroelastic/new_project/home.swf http://eng.tusciaelecta.it/2004-elastic-group/testo-critico http://eng.tusciaelecta.it/2004-elastic-group/intervista http://www.elasticgroup.com/retroelastic/videoperf/contact/textcontact.html http://giusyrubino.altervista.org/RECENSIONE/recensione.html http://www.luxfux.org/n19/artintheory1.htm http://www.eai.org http://www.vdb.org http://www.warholfoundation.org http://acconci.com http://www.paikstudios.com

Biography ELASTIC Group of Artistic Research is present in the international artistic arena with a work strongly characterized by conceptual aspects. It's rooted in the practise of the duo the motto of Duchamp "the public makes the art" and so the reciprocity of the relationship between artistic product and the viewer, which is often involved interactively in the artistic process, becoming part of the work of art. Since 1999, they are authors of many Public Video Art projects developed in contemporary and historical architecture sites.

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AEQUILIBRIUM. LOCATION BASED ENTERTAINMENT AND TRANSMEDIA FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE GIULIA BERTONE, DOMENICO MORREALE DIST - Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies And Planning, Politecnico Di Torino [email protected] Dipartimento di studi sociologici e psicopedagogici - Facoltà di Lettere Università degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi [email protected]

Abstract

Aequilibrium - Te last guardian of Leonardo is an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) designed to experiment with creative solutions for cultural heritage. It is a transmedia and location-based experience that engages players in an adventure that blurs the boundaries between reality and fction, digital and physical spaces, fctional characters and real people from the local community. Aequilibrium ofers useful insights for those who are interested in digital and interactive media and their relationship with physical space, especially in relation to the theme of engagement in the new augmented spaces (Manovich: 2006) and hyperconnected places (De Souza: 2011; Farman: 2012). Starting from the analysis of the Aequilibrium project and the experience of the players, this article elaborates on some of the dimensions needed to understand how games and transmedia strategies may be employed in the creation of digital engagement in new hyper mediated habitats (Bolter, Grusin: 2002). Furthermore the article focuses on how the game promotes participation in the narrative construction of experience, through cultural activators able to foster collaboration, collective intelligence and creative grassroots production.

Keywords

Alternate Reality Game, Cultural Heritage, Locative Media, Transmedia Storytelling

Introduction Aequilibrium is an Alternate Reality Game (ARG), which exploits locative and transmedia communication strategies for creating an immersive experience to promote a cultural brand, such as Leonardo Da Vinci, and cultural resources of an area, Lomellina, Lombardy (Italy), and its cultural institutions. Te project is part of the "We Art Technology - Youth and cross-media" initiative, that aims at promoting digital creativity, involving young people in creative activities and games supported by digital media. "Youth and cross-media" is promoted and supported by the Italian Ministry of Youth and the National Association of Italian Municipalities, involving the City of Vigevano, the municipality of Mortara (PV ), the municipality of Formigine (MO), AST - Consortium for Territorial Development and the association for free software LUG Ducale (Vigevano - PV ). Te project will end in December 2013. Te activities triggered by the 1

project are carried out in close collaboration with LeoHub, a research center on Digital Heritage at the Castello Sforzesco in Vigevano and Politecnico di Torino - degree in "Cinema and media engineering”. Te project aims at experimenting innovative formats for the involvement of young people, based on the potential of game, video and social networks and physical interaction with the city and the territory through network devices and location-based mobile devices.

The transmedia design of Aequilibrium Aequilibrium is a transmedia project, a narrative that unfolds through diferent media, both online and ofine, in which each medium adds an independent contribution to the narrative. Transmedia is the framework for the creation of a universe that includes historical and geographical elements mixed with fctional characters and situations that encourages users to actively explore contents, in a game that comes in part online and partly in the territory. Aequilibrium is an Alternate Reality Game (ARG), namely, according to Jef Watson (“ARG 2.0” posted in Henry Jenkins’s blog on July 7, 2010), who quotes and revise the defnition of the White Paper of the International Game Developers Association, Special Interest Group on ARG (available online at http://archives.igda.org/arg/resources/IGDA-AlternateRealityGames-Whitepaper-2006.pdf), a “form of interactive transmedia storytelling that [takes] the substance of everyday life and [weaves] it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the real world. In an ARG, players discover the game through an encounter with one or more access points embedded in real world contexts. Tese access points, known in the parlance of ARGs as “rabbit holes,” lead players into a dynamic matrix of story components distributed across various kinds of digital and physical media” (Watson: 2010). Te decision to use an ARG as a strategy of engagement capable of stimulating audience to a better understanding of local areas and cultural heritage, derives from the characteristic of the transmedia storytelling to immerse the audience in an explorable fctional universe and activate the audience through game dynamics in which several elements function as "cultural activators" ( Jenkins: 2006). Cultural activators are objects that invite users to actively decoding them, ofering incomplete information and suggesting for actions and rewards, through which to increase the knowledge of the fctional universe and complete the reconstruction of the narrative. Te story of Aequilibrium spreads across hundreds of years. Te following abstract is useful to understand how the storytelling has been distributed through diferent platforms and diferent media, so to engage the user in a detection aimed to reconstruct the story. At the end of 1400, while studying natural disasters, Leonardo Da Vinci comes into contact with Xianshi, a secret society that owns a powerful device that, by manipulating water, is able to create huge natural disasters in specifc areas of a territory. Leonardo settled for a few years in Lomellina and during his stay at the Sforzesca, near Vigevano, gave birth to the Ordo Aequilibri, an order of guardians who had the task of protecting him in his studies and to carry on his battle against Xianshi. Leonardo designed a hydraulic machine, activated by a variable number of Chalices of Aequilibrium that contain a quantity of water known only by their Cornerstones Keepers. Te Ordo Aequilibri has played a key role in the defeat of Nazism. In France thanks to France libre, and in Italy thanks to Giovanni Sacchi, the penultimate guardian. After the war Giovanni founded the Aurora Orchestra, an activity of coverage that allowed him weaving his relationships without being discovered. He was captured by Xianshi that made him interned in the asylum of Collegno near Turin, to try to extort the secrets of the Order. Giovanni hide valuable information (audio recordings with the history of the Ordo Aequilibrium) and ran. A collaborator of Giovanni Sacchi found his recordings and thanks to his nephew, Alessandro Novaro, a young student, created a website dedicated to Orchestra Aurora, with the aim to publish Giovanni Sacchi’s recordings, in a protected area accessible only to Guardian’s assistants. Giovanni 2

Sacchi was imprisoned by Tierry Latreille, one of the world leaders of the Organization. His son, Leo Latreille, created a research centre called Xianshi studying natural disasters. On September 14 Xianshi has planned a worldwide attack that will develop in diferent parts of the world. On September 14 th the Last Guardian, Matteo Bernini, a watchmaker who is trying to create a Novus Ordo Aequilibri, gathers all his assistants in Lomellina to play a geocaching experience and save the world.

Aequilibrium’s Platform layout and Action Chart, the tentpole, the rabbit hole and the two-steps engagement strategy Te project workfow included the design of the Platform layout, the Platform Action Chart and the Project roll-out, tools and methodologies that in a transmedia project help to manage the relationships between the platforms, the contents and user actions in a diachronic dimension (Giovagnoli: 2013). Te role of the platforms of a transmedia system is described through the Platform layout: a scheme representative of the distribution of contents across platforms. Te platform layout does not contain chronological indications; it represents all the relationships between the various media and the authorship of the works created by the authors (at the top) and by the users (at the bottom).

Fig. n. 1 - Aequilibrium: Platform Layout

Te story of Aequilibrium is spread over 17 platforms, each one ofering a frst-person storytelling. Websites, Facebook profles and pages, blog and emails, refers to fctional characters that tell a part of the whole story from their point of view. Each platform has to develop an imaginative pidgin (Giovagnoli: 2009) a language that mimics that used by the real referent of the fctional character and that is easily recognizable by the user (i.e. the formal language of a cultural centre for the Xianshi website). A number of Facebook profles have been created, so to make the storytelling more engaging and plausible and to let users interact with fctional characters as if they were real persons. A number of real life experiences have been performed in two towns. Players had to reach clues in real locations and members of the Aequilibrium staf secretly video-recorded players’ actions posting them online.

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Fig. n. 2 - Aequilibrium: Platform Action Chart

Te “Platform Action Chart” is a diagram representative of the distribution of the story and contents across platforms. It contains chronological and diachronic indications, which proceed from the frst clue and call to action until the closing of the communication system. It is divided into platforms and shows, from left to right, all contents and relationships in the various assets, including exclusively the works and the narrative spaces provided by the authors, and not by the users. Te Aequilibrium’s “Platform Action Chart” shows how the whole story has been spread over multiple media products to be distributed on diferent platforms during the phases of the game. It also shows the diferent points of entry of the story, namely the doors through which users can access fctional universe and the “Rabbit Hole” (RH), the frst point of entry (in chronological order) in the fctional universe, that provides clues to the story, creates the motivation to actively enter the experience (Davidson: 2010). In Aequilibrium the Rabbit Hole is a video teaser posted online on June 2013 showing a man in an old room, reaching a desk with strange objects from diferent historic periods, opening a box and fnding a key. A voice over speaks about a confict against a dangerous terrorist organization that has lasted for more than 500 years. Finally the address of a website appears: it is the bridge to the homepage of the project. Following the link, players are able to fnd the point of entry: the Facebook page of the Last Guardian of Ordo Aequilibri and a Tumblr made by a French Man, a collaborator of the Guardian. In a transmedia project exists a tentpole, a privileged media product/experience that supports a number of other experiences related to it ( Jenkins: 2006; Davidson: 2010). More casual fans can enjoy the tentpole, while more dedicated fans can fnd the diferent related media that expand the experience. Aequilibrium’s tentpole is the gameplay on the territory that will take place on September 2013, during a one day geocaching experience. Te aim is to let players discover cultural heritage through gameplay and through an engaging storytelling. All the participants will get the basic information about the plot before the event of September 2013, but participants have also the opportunity to explore the fctional universe through a “warm-up” gameplay (from June to August 2013) that let them acquire knowledge about fctional and non fctional story elements: characters, relationships between Leonardo Da Vinci and Lomellina, places hosting 4

the gameplay and their cultural heritage. All this topics are presented through clues that participants have to solve moving from media to real places. Clues are the bridges that suggest other entry point for the transmedia communication project. While the tentpole will be promoted through a social media campaign, to reach the largest audience, and the basic elements of the plot will be made available also to those who didn’t played the “warm-up” experience, the targets of “fan” and “ARG players” will be engaged through the online video’s clues for the cultural activation of the “warm-up” gameplay.

Aequilibrium’s Production Roll-out, collective intelligence and grassroots production. From interaction to participation. Te Production Roll-out is a form of schematic representation of the sequence of publishing content and the activities planned in the communication system of the project. It is divided by platforms. It indicates the duration and type of interactions and relationships between the various assets of the story in multiple media (Giovagnoli: 2013). Te “Production Roll-out” highlights the possible paths that the user can take to explore the imaginative universe, acquire information and interact with the characters, experiencing an immersive and more rewarding gameplay compared to that experienced by those who live only the fnal steps of the game.

Fig. n. 3 - Aequilibrium: Production Roll-out

Te “Production Roll-out” and the “Platform layout” also shows the spaces for users participation in the decoding of cultural activators and the production of grassroots contents. With ARG there is a passage from interactivity, that emerges from the properties of media technologies, to participation, emerging from the protocols and social practices around media. Te two main forms of participation involved in Aequilibrium’s transmedia experience are collective intelligence applied to the solution of puzzles and the production of grassroots contents capable of guiding and modifying storytelling. Collective intelligence is a term coined by 5

Pierre Lévy in the nineties and used by Henry Jenkins to analyze the dynamics of participatory consumption of media contents in converging culture ( Jenkins: 2006). Since media consumption has become more and more a collective process and online environments encourage discussions about contents, new forms of media production rises, forms that point on increasing the complexity of the contents, which function as activators of a fan base that perform online complex decoding operations based on the exchange of contents and sharing of information. Each participant in a collective intelligence contributes to the solution of a problem sharing his knowledge just in time (Levy: 1994). In Aequilibrium puzzle and clues are meant to be solved collectively, through active collaboration of players in spaces provided for their interactions: the Facebook page of the Last Guardian, the blog of Alex Novaro, the young student who manage the website of the Orchestra Aurora, the fan site conceived to publish the audio messages of the penultimate Guardian. In these spaces the players are encouraged to share the results of their research and to work together to achieve shared solutions. Players developed strategies and methodologies to improve their coordination, such as synthesis and points of the situation, posted online every time a riddle is solved, so to help new players to enter the fctional universe. Te strong engagement with contents makes fans the most active segment of audience, the desire to strengthen the link with the fctional universe pushes them to share information with other fans and to produce content related to their passion. Te dynamics of collective intelligence put in place by the players often lead to the achievement of results that drive authors to modify some elements of the story, in order to include the contribution of users, especially when this contribution expands the fctional universe and adds possibilities for players’ identifcation with the characters. In the Aequilibrium’s fctional universe a whole new storyline, that has to do with the expansion of Ordo Aequilibri in France, has been designed starting from the interpretation of the trailer made by a group of players, who identifed elements related to the cross of Lorraine and the defeat of Charles the Bold and imagined narrative hypothesis that represented a potential enrichment of the Aequilibrium’s imaginative universe. Participation in the construction of the storyworld is also evident in the production of content by users who have the ability to share texts, photos, images and videos on the Facebook page. Synthesis, hypotheses, drawings, pictures of the locations during the live action gameplay, reworking of ofcial contents (i.e. audio flterings of video in search of hidden clues…) are the heritage of content that players contribute to build around the fctional universe of Aequilibrium.

Geocaching in Aequilibrium: the “Cornerstones” and the experience of place between digital and physical spaces On September 14th, Aequilibrium ends with a geocaching event in Lomellina. Geocaching is a playful technological practice typical of the world of LBMGs (Location Based Mobile Games), a high-tech reinterpretation of the classic treasure hunt, in which participants use mobile GPS-enabled devices to find or hide small containers – the caches - in physical spaces. The GPS coordinates of the caches are recorded online in digital environments (the most famous is www.geocaching.com) in which players also share their experience of discovery. Started almost by accident in 2000, geocaching is now a common practice all over the world, involving more than 6 million people and generating a real subculture of fans. Since geocaching has become increasingly common due to the spread of mobile and location-aware technologies, Locative Media Studies have begun investigating it with interest. Many scholars emphasizes that geocaching is an experience that takes place in different spaces of interaction, both physical (the local area where the cache is hidden), and digital (the website on which the GPS coordinates are recorded and on which players can leave their reviews, or the mobile GPS-enabled device with mapping features that locates the position of the player and the cache). Thus, this playful practice is based on a sort of collaboration between bits and atoms, virtual and material spaces and requires participants to know how to effectively manage different interfaces. It is emblematic of our current technological environment, where, with the spread of mobile interfaces, 6

navigating simultaneously different spaces has become a common practice. Like other LBMGs, geocaching is a typical mobile practice at the time of Net Localities (Gordon, De Souza and Silva: 2011), in which the production of the space becomes an embodied experience connected with technology (Farman: 2012). These games are considered by scholars (De Souza and Silva, Sutko: 2009) real creative practices, in which participants can recreate the meaning of places by acting on them with digital technologies. Often through the charming power of exploration, these practices allow people to create an alternative level of place experience, stimulating their ability to experiment new meanings related to local sites. Further, Gordon (2009) investigates the geocaching as a useful practice for the production of local knowledge, that kind of local common culture necessary to aggregate communities around shared values and meanings, «transforming that physical space into a collectively understood platform for interaction» (Gordon: 2009, 31). Starting from these considerations, we decided to experiment geocaching to connect the fictional dimension, the online transmedia digital world, with the physical world. Geocaching in Aequilibrium is based on the search of the Aequilibrium Cornerstones. They are special places in which small glass tubes are hidden (the Aequilibrium Chalices) containing a defined amount of water that the members of the Order have hidden all over the world for the maintenance of the cosmic balance. Of all the Cornerstones in the world, just those in Lomellina are now still working. All the others have been sabotaged by the sect Xianshi. Now the latter are also in danger, because the sect has managed to drain all the water of the Chalices in Lomellina, which are on the verge of quitting working. The aim of the participants is to find the Cornerstones, by solving puzzles related to the figure of Leonardo da Vinci, reach them guided by GPS devices, and restore the right amount of water. To do so, they will be forced to interact with the Cornerstones Keepers which are the only ones to know the right amount of water in each Chalices. Once they fill the Chalices and solve all the puzzles, participants will be able to find the GPS coordinates to reach the Last Guardian, who is hidden in an unknown location.

The values of the landscape: Leonardo da Vinci, the Waters, the Rice In addition to Leonardo, geocaching in Aequilibrium recovers two other strategic key points for the identity of the area: the water and the rice. Tese elements are embodied in signifcant points of interest in the landscape, characterized by the presence of rice paddies and an intricate maze of canals, irrigation ditches, torrents, which create a typical environment of great natural and cultural value. As rice cultivation has historically characterized all aspects of local material culture and identity, lots of initiatives for the conservation and enhancement of the tangible and intangible heritage linked to it have been carried out by local stakeholders (projects for the valorization of local historical farmhouses, or several rural museums). Further, many local researches on the intangible heritage related to rural culture have been conducted, which document, tradition and knowledge related to life in farms. It is not a coincidence, then, that the most important projects of local development look at the water and rice as powerful values. Te theme of water is of course connected also with the fgure of Leonardo da Vinci, whose presence in the territory at the time of Ludovico il Moro is historically documented and is embodied in some symbolic places, real traces of the Genius in the area. With the involvement of local stakeholders we have therefore identifed the most signifcant places that could return most of the experience of these issues - Leonardo, the water and the rice - and there, in the area between Vigevano and Mortara, the caches were placed. In particular, the choice fell on signifcant places near rice mills and farmhouse, rice felds, canals, ditches, rivers; watermills, hydroelectric power plants, touristic and dining businesses related to the rice (typical restaurant, farm holidays, retailers of typical products linked to the processing of rice); places tracing the presence of Leonardo (Castello Sforzesco, the Stables, Piazza Ducale, the Mill of Mora Bassa, the Villa Sforza with the Colombarone). Te Cornerstones are placed in these sites, at geographical coordinates that players have to discover by solving puzzles related to 7

the concept of balance in the work of Leonardo. Each Cornerstone is presented through an information page accessible online through a QR code, printed and placed inside the Chalice. Te page contains a brief description of the location and information about how to fnd the Cornerstone Keepers, the person who holds the Cornerstone, takes care of its maintenance and that will give participants the information needed to restore the exact amount of water.

The Cornerstones Keepers: experiencing the landscape on the edge of the magic circle Te Cornerstones Keepers are envisioned to enable further interaction with places and its inhabitants and strengthen local awareness. They are shopkeepers, farmers, restaurateurs, members of associations, elderly millers and rice weeders… people whose lives are in some way related to the theme of water and rice and living near the Cornerstones. In the weeks before the event, they have been involved asking their availability to take part in the game, helping the participants that will come at their home asking for assistance. Each Cornerstone Keeper will help in the geocaching with her own peculiarity, coming from a specifc local history and from the experience she embeds. Te Keepers are therefore elements that are on the edge of what Huizinga (1938) defnes the “magic circle”, that metaphorical and, according to Salen and Zimmerman (2004), “fuzzy and permeable” boundary that separate what is game from what is not: they stay on the border that separates the space of the game from the everyday life. Tey are liminal fgures, which help to embed the geocaching into the real physical space, into the “here and now” of the local sites. A geocaching based only on fctional elements would have had the risk of alienating the participants from the context, completely transfgurating the physical space into the narrative space, overshadowing the physical local elements which the ARG, on the contrary, aims at promoting. Te interaction with the Keepers thus aims at making players more aware of their embodiment (Farman: 2012) in the history of places, which are characterized by values and elements that they are called to discover. With them Aequilibrium introduces a strong element of unpredictability and opacity in the logic of remediation of the game (Bolter: 1999): the Keepers disturb the immersion in the fctional world, bringing the real life inside the magic circle. Following the thinking of many scholars that have debated the concept of Huizinga’s “magic circle” - a core and often criticized issue within game studies¹ - Montola (2009) argues that the main feature of pervasive games is the “porosity” of the circle. Pervasive games, like others contemporary playful practices including ARGs, expand the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of the game. In the case of LBMGs, this porosity stay at the core, since the space of everyday real life is introduced inside the circle as constitutive. Te space of ordinary life is not a neutral support, which must disappear in the ecstasy of an immersive playful experience, but it is indeed a key factor, of which players can have diferent degrees of awareness. According to de Lange (2009) the nature of LBMGs is actually the possibility of playing with the boundaries of the circle, moving and repositioning them in continuous and generating engagement not using fctional immersion, but through the exciting experience of a non-stop moving between digital and physical, between the virtual and the real, between the ordinary and the extraordinary: “Te play element in locative media lies not so much inside the “game space” itself but in the continuous movements between the digital world and the physical world. Part of the joy is the uncertainty of what is actually belongs to either world. Tis locative platform creates confusion: in which space am I moving? Am I adding digital representations to the physical world? Or am I adding physical experiences of places to my online social network? Tis locative platform afords the mobility to continuously step through the porous membrane of the magic circle” (De Lange: 2009, p. 61).

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Conclusions Te ARG Aequilibrium - Te Last Guardian of Leonardo experiments transmedia and geocaching in the feld of cultural heritage. With the playful practice of geocaching, Aequilibrium promotes connections between the fctional world and the real one, giving participants the chance to discover cultural, social and historical values embedded in the Lomellina Landscape. Te article presented the Aequilibrium’s design process, as well as the communication and interaction strategies for digital engagement in new hyper mediated habitats, focusing on how the game encourages participation in the storytelling, through cultural activators able to foster collective intelligence and grassroots production.

Bibliography Bolter J. D., Grusin R., (1999), Remediation. Understanding New Media, Cambridge-London: MIT Press. De Lange, M., (2009), From Always on to Always Tere: Locative Media as Playful Technologies, in A. de Souzae Silva, D. M. Sutko (eds.), Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 5570. Davidson D., (2010), Cross-media Communications: An Introduction to the Art of Creating Integrated Media Experiences, Pittsburgh: ETC Press. Farman J., (2012), Mobile Interface Teory. Embodied Space and Locative Media, New York: Routledge. Fine, G.A., (1983), Shared Fantasy: Role-playing Games as Social Worlds, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Giovagnoli M., (2013), Transmedia. Storytelling e comunicazione, Milan: Apogeo. Giovagnoli M, (2009), Crossmedia. Le nuove narrazioni, Milan: Apogeo. Gordon E., (2009), Redifning the Local: Te Distinction between Located Information and Local Knowledge in Location Based Games. In A. de Souza e Silva, D. M. Sutko (eds.), Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 21-36. Gordon E., de Souza e Silva A., (2011), Net Locality. Why Location Matters in a Networked World, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Huizinga J., (1938), Homo ludens: Versuch einer bestimmung des spielelements der kultur (ed. it.: Homo Ludens, Turin: Einaudi, 2002). Lévy P., (1994), L’Intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace, Paris: La Découverte. Jenkins H., (2006), Convergence Culture, New York: New York University Press. Juul, J., (2005), Half-real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manovich L., (2013), Software Takes Command, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Montola M., Stenros J., Waern, A., (2009), Pervasive Games: Teory and Design, Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann. Pargman, D., Jacobsson, P., (2006), Te Magic is Gone: A Critical Examination of the Gaming Situation, in M. Santorineos (ed.), Gaming Realities: A Challenge for Digital Culture, Mediaterra Festival, Athens: Fournos Centre for the Digital Culture, pp. 15–22. Salen, K., Zimmerman, E., (2004), Te Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McGonigal, J., (2003), “‘Tis is not a game’: Immersive Aesthetics & Collective Play”, in Digital arts & culture 2003 conference proceedings. DAC 2003, Melbourne: Australia. http://www.seanstewart.org/beast/mcgonigal/notagame/paper.pdf Poremba, C., (2007), Critical Potential on the Brink of the Magic Circle, in A. Baba (ed.), Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 situated play conference, University of Tokyo, pp. 772–778, http://www.digra.org/wp9

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Biography Giulia Bertone graduated in Communication Sciences, obtained in 2012 a PhD in Cultural Heritage. Te PhD thesis - "Connecting places. Te involvement of local communities in participatory development of the territory: the prospects opened up by locative media "- explores the relationship between digital media, places, participation and communities, investigating the role that location-aware technologies can play in the enhancing of cultural landscapes. Her research investigates how digital media, and in particular locationaware and mobile technologies, are changing the concept of place, the use of public spaces and the relationship between community and places, opening new opportunities for involvement and place-based engagement. Domenico Morreale after graduating in Communication Sciences at the University of Turin, obtained his doctorate in Sociology of cultural and communicative processes at the Politecnico di Torino. He is a researcher at the Department of sociological and psycho-pedagogical studies, Guglielmo Marconi University where he teaches the courses "Teories and techniques of mass communication" and, from 2012 "Teory and philosophy of language of the media and entertainment" and "Literature and audiovisual Communication", within the degree course in “Film & TV Production” (in collaboration with the Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida, USA). He is teaching assistant for the course "Social sciences and cross-media" and "Film Production", Master of Science in “Cinema and media engineering” at the Politecnico di Torino.

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1 On this issue please refer to Salen, Zimmerman: 2004; Juul: 2003; Pargman, Jacobsson: 2006; Malaby: 2007; Poremba: 2007; McGonigal: 2003; Fine: 1983.

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ELASTIC SYSTEMS FOR COMPLIANT SHADING ENCLOSURES. DYNAMIC FAÇADE SYSTEMS WITH INNOVATIVE TEXTILE MATERIALS. CHIARA GREGORIS

University IUAV of Venice [email protected]

Abstract

Today textile materials perform a great number of functions in various felds. In architecture they are widely used for roofs and tensile structures; in our houses we fnd them in curtains and furniture covers. It is on façades, however, that their great potential can especially be shown. Textile materials used as cladding can soften the surrounding space, they can shelter from the sun or help the light flter; they can be luminescent, colourful, or iridescent. Because of their properties, textile materials can be diversely used in the applications of façades, both as shielding – thus facilitating energy conservation – and in relation to the environment and the people – thus employing the façade either as a support for advertisement and information, or as an urban screen or a Landmark. In the course of this paper, we shall analyse a case study that makes use of textile materials on façades; indeed, these textile materials allow for the creation of a prototype of kinetic façade which uses smart materials.

Keywords

Fabric Architecture, Media Architecture, Kinetic Façade, Textile Materials

Introduction “In the essential human need for food, clothing and shelter, fabric has mostly been associated with clothing or fashion. However, the word “fabric” refers to the underlying structure of an artefact made by weaving, felting, knitting or crocheting. Woven cloth originated in Mesopotamia around 5,000 BC. From fax and rafa to camel hair and bamboo, methods of thatching or woven woods allowed primitive and ancient societies a way to use fabric in enhancing the function or identity of shelter.” (Rees: 2008) In contemporary architecture, textile materials for external use are chiefy employed for roofng or solar shielding. Particularly interesting is, however, the use that can be made of them on façades, both as vertical closure, and as mediums of images and information.

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Materials, applications and colours Te textiles now used for cladding are called ‘technical’, for they meet prime technical/qualitative requirements. Tey can be made from various materials, and they can generally be yarn, biaxial fabrics (weft/warp), and multiaxial fabrics (3D and 4D); while they cannot be laminated fabrics (flms), mat fabrics, coated fabrics, or multilayer composites. All textiles are characterised by three basic features: lightness, permeability to natural lighting, and deformability. Lightness, thanks to its minimal thickness, facilitates the installation and the minimization of both the material and its support; permeability can be controlled by the fbre mesh; deformability enables such a freedom in project that would be unthinkable with traditional architecture materials. A strategic feature of textile materials is colour. Today there are various diferent methods of coloration: from the more traditional ones – like coloration by immersion, appliqués, and diferentiation among the fbre colours – to moulding by heat transfer, and digital printing. All these methods transform textiles into big colourful canvases. Several examples of this can be found in urban building yards, where big textile surfaces, used as locks and for security reasons, become supports of images. Textile materials can also be used as surfaces for the projections of high or low defnition videos and of luminous efects, thus becoming true medias. Furthermore, it is possible to incorporate luminous devices – like LEDs – into the waft, thus creating illuminating surfaces. An example can be the one of “Mediamesh”, which incorporates RGB LEDs into a supporting metal mesh, thus becoming a low defnition screen. Another example can be the new luminous textiles, where optical fbres are incorporated to synthetic fbres (such as Nylon). Tese optical fbres are connected to the edges of the cloth with LEDs, which project the light into the fbres, thus creating variations in light and colour into the textile. Textile materials become supports for communication and art. Just like the canvas receives colour from the painter, thus textile coatings turn façades into places of exploration and of artistic and cultural research. Light and colour, however, are not the only testing grounds of textile coatings: another testing ground is movement. Kinetic textile façades combine two fundamental aspects, they are both Media Façades, that is, they use technology to realize façades as information screens or artwork at an urban scale, and intelligent façades, with the possibility to create responsive membranes that adapt to changing environmental conditions and user occupancy. In today’s architectural landscape, which aims at sustainable approach and development, solar shielding systems contribute towards energy conservation, becoming more and more widespread. Furthermore, textile materials have the advantage of enabling solar shielding even when making the light flter, thus creating original efects.

Elastic Systems for Compliant Shading Enclosures Tis prototype, developed by Brent Vander Werf for the University of Arizona, aims at fnding a system able to deform in response to thermal and light incentives, and to create apertures, in order to produce shading and thermal comfort between the outdoor and the indoor spaces. Te study focuses on elastic materials and structures. It investigates their physical and mechanical properties in order to fnd the perfect combination which is able to deform and then retrieve its original form without leaving any permanent alterations. Te system is conceived to be placed on the east and west façades of a building in a desertic area. Te project consists in a mobile mechanism within a glass enclosure. Te mechanism is activated exclusively by the heat of sunlight. Te sun heats up a coil – the actuator – which expands, and then starts rotating bimetal strips. Tese strips are made of thermo-bimetals (TB), which are, in their turn, made of several metals layers – all welded together – with diferent coefcients of thermal expansion. Terefore, when subjected to heat, the 2

metals deform in various and diferent ways, thus acquiring a curving form. Te bending is also afected by the ratio of the moduli of elasticity of the metallic layers and their thickness ratio; it is, furthermore, the bending of the metal is directly proportional to the diference in the coefcient of expansion and the temperature change of the component. When it is more subjected to heat, the system resumes its original position. “With direct exposure to sunlight, the enclosure experience a “miosis” function, or the constriction of light, based on thermal expansion properties of smart materials and programmatic structural arrangement. With no direct exposure to sunlight, the enclosure experiences a “mydriasis” or dilation function, allowing for indirect light to penetrate into interior spaces based on the orientation and materials ability to recoil with lack of heat input.” (Vander Werf: 2009) Several experiments were performed in order to fnd the most suitable material for the membranes. Te textile had to be extensible and deformable; it had to bear all the necessary cuts to produce the apertures which would make the mechanism work. Te materials considered were: Rubber membranes: Silicone Rubber, EDPM (Ethylene-Propylene), SBS (Styrene Butadiene Styrene); Plastic sheets: ETFE (EthyleneTetrafuorethylene); Fabric Membranes: Plastic Fabrics, PVC Coated Polyester, PTFE Coated Glass Fiber, Urethane Coated Nylon, Silicon Coated Fiberglass. In the end, the chosen material, whose features best encountered the requirements of this prototype, was PVC Coated Polyester, which was, then, sewn into the metal support system regulating its movement. Te colour of the membrane was also considered as a variable: “Te color and fnish of the membrane was considered an integral property throughout the system as it directly relates to the resultant light and heat characteristics. Dark fabrics were utilized in an attempt to increase heat gain in the enclosure while providing less light refection and in turn light fabrics were modeled to refect and redirect light while decreasing heat gain. Neutral colors were also investigated as a median fabric which could take advantage of both light and heat properties critical to the system.2.” (Vander Werf: 2009) Te prototype developed by Vander Werf is completely independent and autonomous, as well as involving zero energy consumption. It guarantees both solar shielding, and permeability of light without the intervention of its users; thanks to the smart materials employed in it, this prototype adapts to the sunlight. Te more and more widespread study and employment of innovative solar shielding systems, together with the appearance of kinetic façades in the architectural landscape, are two reasons for innovations in technologies, systems and materials – which often come from other felds, like mechanics or electronics.

Elastic Systems for Compliant Shading Enclosures, Brent D. Vander Werf, 2009

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Other recent façade systems Te prototype "Elastic Compliant Shading Systems for Enclosures" is a homeostatic enclosure seeking to ensure the internal thermal and visual comfort by controlling the entry of light and of heat into indoor spaces. In recent years, many projects have been aiming at developing self-regulation systems which allow climate control – while taking account of both energy resources, and of the costs involved in these systems. Researches have often resulted in kinetic façades: “Te primary purpose of the building envelope is to protect the inhabitants from the outside environment. Although usually static systems, façades are designed to respond to many scenarios and perform functions that can be contradictory to each other: daylighting versus energy efciency, ventilation versus views and energy generation. By actuating the façades and making them dynamic, they can better adapt to the conditions, provide for improved comfort of the occupants, and achieve a more sustainable design by reducing the compromises needed for that balance.” (Kensek, Hansanuwat: 2011) One of the most famous and signifcant examples is the “Homeostatic façade” by Decker and Yeadon. Another example by the same authors is “Smart Screen”. Both projects employ intelligent membranes, which reduce energy consumptions by preventing both direct light and the heat of the sun from entering indoor spaces, through the use of autonomous mechanisms that screen without any control by users. Te research for new textile materials for the construction of façade systems is developing also as regards static surfaces. An example can be the “ICD / ITKE Research Pavilion 2012”, the new temporary research pavilion at the University of Stuttgart – a cooperation between the Research Pavilion of the Institute for Computational Design (ICD) and the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE). Te pavilion is entirely robotically fabricated from carbon and glass fbre composites, the fabric was chosen as the material in research of material and morphological principles of arthropods’ exoskeletons as a source of exploration for a new composite construction paradigm in architecture: the fbre orientation, fbre arrangement and associated layer thickness and stifness gradients in the exoskeleton of the lobster were carefully investigated to “design a robotically fabricated shell structure based on a fbre composite system in which the resin saturated glass and carbon fbres were continuously laid by a robot, resulting in a compounded structure with custom fbre orientation.” In a contemporary society dominated by restlessness and a constant bombing of information, architecture adapts and becomes a mirror of this trend. Façades, therefore, become suitable for experimentation, seek to provide the buildings and the interior spaces with functional improvements, and they also support communication by creating messages and images visible by observers. As regards façade claddings and, more particularly, textile coatings, research is a key element of projects. Materials and systems are analysed so that new and diferent solutions can be found – as we have seen in the above - mentioned examples. Tey are more and more in the van, and take inspiration from other felds of application, such as chemistry, electronics, mechanics, and so on. “At frst glance, the idea of a “smart” fabric may seem curious, but smart fabrics represent an area of enormous potential. […] Many applications developed to date are for clothing, but similar technologies can be envisioned as applying to the many fabrics used in architecture or product design.” (Addington, Schodek: 2005) Indeed, high-performance intelligent textiles can present changes in their properties, transfers of energy, or they can function as sensors. 4

Colour can also be a fundamental aspect of these researches: “Tere are many fabrics that deal in one way or another with light and color. Diferent kinds of flms with special refective or transmission qualities can also be applied to traditional fabrics or directly woven into them, imparting many of the qualities of flms.” (Addington, Schodek: 2005) Te potentials of technology and materials create chromatic expressions that can be innovatively employed, especially in communication. Colour is an inextricable part of human perception; thus, by employing it on façades, it helps create clear and intelligible images and symbols.

Conclusions In conclusion, it is clear that the feld of fabric architecture is in constant development thanks to the innovations in the felds of materials, of systems, and of technologies. Several researches deal with issues such as the transmission of sound through textiles, or new multilayer materials ensuring thermal insulation, or even rigid materials which do not need to be supported by other materials such as steel. Textile materials are, then, beginning to play a role that goes far beyond the traditional ones of fnishing, ornament, or simple technical element; on the contrary, they are becoming architectural elements of façades.

Bibliography AAVV, (2004), Innovation in Architecture, London: Spoon Press. Addington M., Schodek D., (2005), Smart materials and new technologies, Oxford: Architectural Press. Gasparini, K. (2009), Design in superfcie, tecnologie dell’involucro architettonico mediatico, Milan: Franco Angeli. Gasparini K., (2012), Schermi urbani: tecnologia e innovazione: nuovi sistemi per le facciate mediatiche, Milan: Wolters Kluwer. Kensek, K., Hansanuwat, R., (2011). Environmental Control Systems for Sustainable Design: A Methodology for Testing, Simulating and Comparing Kinetic Façade Systems, Sandy Bay: CSABE. Premier A., (2012), Superfci dinamiche: le schermature mobili nel progetto di architettura: innovazione tecnologica, architectural design, sostenibilità, Milan: Franco Angeli. Reed P., (2008), “Fabric transforms buildings and allows designers to get creative,” in Specialty Fabrics Review, October 2008, pp. 15-18. Sebestyen G., (2003), New Architecture and Technology, Oxford: Architectural Press. Vander Werf B. D., (2009), Elastic Systems for Compliant Shading Enclosures, Tucson: University of Arizona Library Release. Zanelli A., (2011), “I tessili tecnici per l’architettura”, in Costruire in laterizio, No.144, pp. 20-24. Zeh M., (2012), “On the move: fabric membranes change shape”, in Fabric Architecture, may, pp. 31-37. http://www.lumigram.com http://www.deckeryeadon.com http://icd.uni-stuttgart.de

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Biography Chiara Gregoris, graduated at University IUAV of Venice in the 2012, with a thesis entitled: "Media Design Contest: From Competition to the Project: A New Envelope for an Industrial Building", advisors prof. K. Gasparini and P. Zennaro. She’s a member of the research unit “Colour and Light in Architecture” as well as free researcher at the University IUAV of Venice.

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“TECHNO-POETRY” WITHIN ZEDEKIAH’S CAVE ANNA MARTINI UAV University of Venice [email protected]

Abstract

“Techno-poetry” is the way the artist Dan Roosegaarde describes the combination of nature and technology he accomplished with the installation Lotus Dome for the Design Light Festival, held in Jerusalem the past June. It consists on a sensitive illuminated dome that continuously opens and closes, changing the cave’s inner surfaces in response to human behaviour. Making use of materials and technologies hailing from external research branches, not only the Studio Roosegaarde but many other architects and artists have developed interactive walls and installations that angle for the “union of innovation and imagination in a merging of disciplines”(Dan Roosegaarde: 2013): techno-poetic could be every interactive artwork that behaves like an intangible natural and organic reaction while using digital and physic systems.

Keywords

Digital Art, Dynamic Façades, Light in Architecture, Media Architecture, Smart Screen

Introduction In the last fve years several prototypical façades and artworks acting like a natural phenomenon have been developed: projects based on the concept of photosynthesis, electromagnetism, homestasis or pupillary light refex are proposed to better the human life and, most of all, the human life inside a building. Reproducing natural self-adjustment mechanisms, these technologies are able to control several factors such as heat, light, humidity, etc. and to act as a membrane from the exterior to the interior (or vice-versa) surfaces of the installation. In order to reach such accomplishment, they are mainly using smart materials and/or smart technologies coming from external branches of scientifc research such as chemistry, computer science, aerospace engineering, etc. When talking about architecture, the integration of these smart solutions inside, outside or above the external envelope helps reducing energy consumption in buildings by continuously regulating heat and light transfer and assisting HVAC systems. Most of the architectural projects that reproduce natural efects have been designed to combine an innovative and charming skin with the necessity of reducing electricity consumption inside the building and greenhouse gas emission outside the building.

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Lotus Dome: a merging of technology and nature Lotus Dome is one of the latest works of Studio Roosegaarde, a dutch design frm whose aim is that of letting a physical space becoming “immaterial in a poetic morphing of physical space and human interaction” (Roosegaarde: 2010). Te Dome is a development of their previous project Lotus 7.0: a wall made out of smart mylar foils, lights and custom electronics connected to movement proximity sensors that make the whole process starting when visitors are passing by. In the meanwhile the spectator is approaching Lotus 7.0, sensors trigger a lighting input to the lamps, which in turn give out heat, causing a shape changing to the foils. Tose hundreds of foils are made of a shape memory alloy (SMA), a material that permits them to unfold in response to a temperature increase and to change back to their initial state when the external solicitation is gone by. No movement, no heat – the “lotuses” will close again, slowly sealing the “transparent voids between private and public,” as Roosegaarde wrote on his website.

Fig. n. 1 - Picture by Avital Pinnick, source: http://www.fickr.com/photos/spindexr/9025030381/in/photolist

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Lotus Dome is a huge hemisphere set inside one of the biggest cave of Jerusalem. Creating a play of light and shadow on the cave’s surface, it looks like a big breathing bunch of fowers whose petals close when nobody get closer it. Te use of mylar on its petals surface, helps the light and the changing context to become as more refected as possible, merging elements of architecture and nature into an interactive environment. Te installation was frst set inside the 17th century Sainte Marie Madeleine church in Lille, France. As we know, Reinassance sculptures and paintings were created in a manner that makes them coming alive when beams of light are fltrating from the windows and brushing by. In the same way, the Studio Roosegaarde’ s artists tried to “update the Renaissance” by “applying a high-tech layer that makes architecture come alive”. “Not only is the Lotus Dome a way for people to experience the dichotomy of modern and historic in one setting, but it also allows visitors to reacquaint themselves with long-forgotten culture, beauty, and art in new light.” (Roosegaarde: 2013)

Fig. n. 2 - Lotus 7.0, Sculpture lumineuse digitale et interactive by Digitalarti

Adaptive materials and Technologies As above- mentioned, most of the technologies reproducing natural and organic adaptions make use of materials that are diferent from the standard ones like glass, plastic, wood, steel, etc. Tey mainly adopt Smart Materials, that is innovative materials, discernible from the traditional for their selectivity, reversibility, immediacy and auto-activation (Addington: 2005). Such innovative materials can be distinguished into two main categories: • •

Energy exchange capability materials Property change capability materials 3

“While property change capability materials absorb the input energy and undergo a change, energy exchange materials stay the same but energy undergoes a change” (Addington: 2005). Energy exchange capability materials (also known as “frst law materials”) are materials capable of producing energy, changing an input energy into another form, thanks to the law of conservation of energy. Products like photovoltaics (PV), photoelectrics, piezoelectrics and thermoelectrics, which produce electric, elastic and thermic energy are part of this category. Technologies using PV materials are the most common in nowadays architecture. PV cells systems installation on roof and façades is already common in new buildings‘ construction, because they can combine together energy production and light-shading. Tese cells, made of crystalline semiconducting materials (mainly siliceous ones) can interact with the solar radiation and convert it into electric energy. In addition to modules, photovoltaics systems that are being used in architecture are the thin flm technologies, that is systems using thinner cells on the order of micron and the dye sensitized solar cells (DSSC), using a photoelectric active dye, but they’re still less common than the traditional silicon modules. A prime example on the use of PV modules in order to create an adaptive-responsive system is the Solar Display, settled in the main square of Linz, Austria, in 2008 and designed by the DOM Research Lab of the University of Art and Industrial Design of Linz: a “self-sustained optical apparatus”. It consists on a regular grid made of Solar Pixel modules (components having a PV module of solar cells on one side and a plastic white surface on the other) that are capable to turn individually and follow the sunlight while regulating solar incidence inside the building. Every Solar Pixel unit communicates with the others through an embedded infrared system controlled by a central computer. Tis technology helps them to create an image or an announcement on the whole display, by tilting towards the ground or the sky and showing their lighter or their darker “face”. Property change capability materials are those smart materials that undergo a change in one or more properties in response to a change on their environment. Included in this class are all color-changing materials such as photochromics, thermochromics, chemochromics, etc., shape memory alloys (SMA) and all the phase changing materials (PCM). Teir property changing is due to an environmental change such as temperature and solar radiation or to a direct energy input such as voltage and current. Shape memory alloys, as we learned from the Lotus Dome, are those materials able to “remember and recover from large strains without permanent deformation” (Schwartz: 2002). Tey’re capable of modify their macroscopic structure in response to a change in tension or in temperature and to get back to their initial shape without undergoing a microscopic variation. Most of the latest prototypes based on the property change capability are using PCM materials, that is that class of materials capable of absorbing energy in the form of latent heat. As a consequence of temperature or pressure changing, they absorb energy by changing from a solid phase to a liquid/gaseous state and release it when, after cooling down, they get back to the earlier state. An emblematic example of the use of adaptive technologies using phase changing materials is the Kinetower, a project from Kinetura, whose double skin is made of PCM shafts that can respond to the environment and adapt to the amount of light is wanted or needed inside the building. Te shafts are paired through a rear stand made of small ashlars that allowed them to maintain a certain grade of rigidity when warping. Another example of innovative adaptive façade system is the Homeostatic Façade, designed by Decker & Yeadon in 2011, a prototype system able to prevent the solar heat gain by acting like an artifcial muscle in order to control the direct solar radiation. Its muscles are made of silver dielectric elastomers (DEs), “a variety of electro-active polymer that deform due to an electrostatic interaction between two electrodes with opposite electric charge” (Mc Hugh, O’Halloran, O’Malley: 2008). Tese muscles open when the sun lights 4

them up and close when the light efect is gone by. Dielectric elastomers are electrically insulating polymers that have a “large amorphous structure, but are lightly cross-linked, and are thus able to undergo large and reversible elastic deformations” (Schwartz: 2002). Te Homeostatic Façade muscles consist on a couple of dielectric foils applied on an inner fexible polymeric core, which warp when lit. Tey don’t need any programming or physical adjustment, they just change shape on their own. Tese are just some examples of the big amount of projects that are being experimented in the feld of adaptive materials and technologies. As we saw, their purpose is not only that of interacting with visitors but also of integrating with the environment in a natural way, combining technology and sensitivity. Most of these “new generation” façade systems and artworks are still on their planning phase but they’re becoming established more and more.

Conclusions Architecture is nowadays asked to achieve a low carbon footprint, a positive impact on the built environment and signifcant savings in operating costs. It has to be environmental responsive, intelligent, reconfgurable and interactive, or, in other words, to be adaptive: the use of smart, nature-emulating materials and technologies is probably the best way to satisfy such requests. "Climate change represents a clear imperative for innovation [...]. Using today's technology, we can embed a building with physical intelligence. It is up to us as designers and engineers, to invent the means and form this intelligence will take.” (Hoberman: 2011).

Bibliography Addington, M., Schodek D., (2005), Smart Materials and Technologies for the Architecture and Design Profession, Oxford: Architectural Press. Gasparini K., (2012), Schermi urbani, tecnologia e innovazione. Nuovi sistemi per le facciate mediatiche, Milan: Wolters Kluwer. Gasparini, K., (2009), Design in superfcie, tecnologie dell’involucro architettonico mediatico, Milan: Franco Angeli. Schwartz M., (2002), Encyclopaedia of Smart Materials, New York: Wiley and Sons. McHugh, O’Halloran, O’Malley, (2008). “A review on dielectric elastomer actuators, technology, application and challenges”, in Journal of Applied Physics, Vol., 104, New York: American Institute of Physics, http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2981642 www.studioroosegaarde.net/ http://www.designboom.com/technology/studio-roosegaarde-lotus-70/ http://www.homestyler.com/procms/project/MTZIJXDHIYGSMN6-1031/lotus-70-by-daan-roosegaarde www.domresearchlab.com http://www.deckeryeadon.com/projects/HomeostaticFacadeSystem.html www.kinetura.com http://www.adaptivebuildings.com/ Hoberman, C. (2011). Living form exhibition, London, Te Adaptive Architecture Conference: http://www.buildingcentre.co.uk/adaptivearchitecture/speakers.html

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Biography Anna Martini, born in Camposampiero (Padua) in 1985, graduated at IUAV University of Architecture of Venice in 2011 with a thesis focusing on Moving Mediabuilding Façades. She started her research on this feld during her Erasmus Program in Graz (Austria), at the Institut für Architekturtechnologie of the TU University of Graz. She’s a member of the research unit “Colour and Light in Architecture” as free researcher at the University IUAV of Venice.

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Screencity Journal Issue 2 / 2013 It is a four-monthly online publication, which includes double blind peer reviewed articles dealing with a assigned topic. The selected papers can include one of more tags listed by Screencity Journal. Cover: photo by Lorenzo Gerbi

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ISSN 2281-1516