highlike

Clouds Architecture Office

AVATAR X Lab
The project is a partnership between ANA Holdings Inc. and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA); a part of AVATAR X, a collaborative program for the advancement of space exploration and development. ANA and JAXA are both experts at launching vehicles into the atmosphere, the feeling of suspension or ‘being in the air’ is natural for both entities. The AVATAR X Lab Building is designed as a suspended building floating above a moon-like crater. The multi-story structure floats eighteen meters above the crater bottom, and is accessible by a bridge. When astronauts board a spacecraft they cross a bridge; when we board a plane we walk across a jet bridge between the terminal and airplane. This is our last contact with familiar ground before taking off for someplace new. The suspended building embodies this crossing of thresholds: after passing over the bridge you are transported to a new place, the AVATAR X Lab Building, where technological innovation will change how we see the world.

DILLER + SCOFIDIO

The Blur Building (an architecture of atmosphere)
The Blur Building is a media pavilion for Swiss EXPO 2002 at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.From piles in the water, a tensegrity system of rectilinear struts and diagonal rods cantilevers out over the lake. Ramps and walkways weave through the tensegrity system, some of them providing a counterweight for the structure. The form is based on the work of Buckminster Fuller.The pavilion is made of filtered lake water shot as a fine mist through 13,000 fog nozzles creating an artificial cloud that measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 65 feet high. A built-in weather station controls fog output in response to shifting climatic conditions such as temperature, humidity, wind direction, and wind speed.The public can approach Blur via a ramped bridge. The 400 foot long ramp deposits visitors at the center of the fog mass onto a large open-air platform where movement is unregulated. Visual and acoustical references are erased along the journey toward the fog leaving only an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of pulsing water nozzles. Prior to entering the cloud, each visitor responds to a questionnaire/character profile and receives a “braincoat” (smart raincoat). The coat is used as protection from the wet environment and storage of the personality data for communication with the cloud’s computer network. Using tracking and location technologies, each visitor’s position can be identified and their character profiles compared to any other visitor.In the Glass Box, a space surrounded by glass on six sides, visitors experience a “sense of physical suspension only heightened by an occasional opening in the fog.” As visitors pass one another, their coats compare profiles and change color indicating the degree of attraction or repulsion, much like an involuntary blush – red for affinity, green for antipathy. The system allows interaction among 400 visitors at any time.Visitors can climb another level to the Angel Bar at the summit. The final ascent resembles the sensation of flight as one pierces through the cloud layer to the open sky. Here, visitors relax, take in the view, and choose from a large selection of commercial waters, municipal waters from world capitals, and glacial waters. At night, the fog will function as a dynamic and thick video screen.

NOHlab x buşra tunç

OCULUS
OCULUS: A Spatial Experience Based on the Interaction of Architecture and Media Arts
An audio-visual performance based on a selection of HAS Architects works interpreted by NOHlab and Buşra Tunç
A selection of HAS Architects’ projects is presented in a performance that blends digital technology with spatial design, forming a synthesis between the past and the present within the magical atmosphere of the historical Single- Dome Hall of the Imperial Arsenal.
Taking the Single-Dome Hall as the focal point, the exhibition uses contemporary interpretations to alternate between old and new, whole and fragment, real and virtual, balanced and unbalanced states. Notions of time and space become blurred and the exhibition surrounds the visitors, offering them an unusual spatial experience.