4dspace: Interactive Architecture

BULLIVANT, Lucy. 2005.
‘4dspace: Interactive Architecture’
Architectural Design, 75(1)

This issue of the Architectural Design series looks at the application of digital technologies within spatial design as a tool for cohesion, communication and exchange. These areas are explored through a series of examples of installations, public art, interactive spaces and structures.

There are many images, references and and other pieces of information included within the volume which I find interesting, entertaining or inspiring; however of most value to me at this point are the less project-specific observations and comments included within the author's introduction. I have therefore chosen to pull out a few quotations from this introduction for consideration:

Pg. 5,

“On one level, interactive architects and designers are in fact responding to the question posed in the 1960s by Cedric Price: What if a building or space could be constantly generated and regenerated?”

Pg. 6,

“Arad, like the German architects realities: united, designers of the BIX media skin of the Kunsthaus Graz, favours low-res tactics in order to achieve appropriate, affordable, as well as poetic and more subliminal, effects, harnessing emotion rather than technology.”

Pg. 6-7,

“New technologies are the means to achieving topographic and environmental change to architectural space and, via distributed intelligence and active material systems, living space that changes its internal parameters and performance in direct response to inhabitants’ lives and external events is possible, Interactive designer Tobi Schneidler, whose personal long-distance relationship prompted the design of Remote Home, believes that interaction and network technologies will engender a new design thinking about the identity of connected, real-world spaces. Another major project from the last few years that explored this potential is the Media House.”

Pg. 7,

“Commerce relies on the fourth dimension of the spatialisation of time achieved through dislocated virtual connectivity.”

Pg. 7,

“The overlap of building and program interactive capabilities brings to the fore unprecedented scope to modify spatial experiences.”

Pg. 11,

“The balloons in the Sky Ear function as cellular automata.”

Further reading:

Works and/or designers mentioned within the text which I might like to explore further include:

• KDa (Klein Dytham Architecture) electronic billboards, which Bullivant describes as 3D hoardings-cum-architecture.
• Usman Haque’s research into the spatial applications of smell for the Wellcome Trust (www.haque.co.uk).
• Ron Arad’s activities in 4D installations.
• Interaction-Ivrea, an educational foundation founded in 2001.