The Pixelated Skin
Realities:United + Rogier van der Heide
More and more, architecture has become image. And that image is, like other images, turning into a medium of communication - a medium that has moreover come to the surface. Guy Debord already foresaw this happening in his book The Society of the Spectacle. The skin of the building is changing: instead of static stone, concrete or glass, what we now see is increasingly often a dynamic image of the kind only made possible by electronics. The skin turns into a display screen on which the message is plainly legible. The building thus turns into an "urban transmitter" whose skin not only shields its interior but functions as a programmable information membrane. The surface has become a pixelated skin, capable of furnishing the city and its inhabitants with information and entertainment. Salient examples of this phenomenon include the well-known NASDAQ Building on Times Square in New York and the Galleria Department Store built by UN Studio in Seoul.
The German group Realities:United and the Dutch lighting designer and director of Arup Lighting, Rogier van der Heide, are both pioneers in this field. Van der Heide collaborated with UN Studio on the design and execution of the Galleria Mall. Realities:United have been involved in among other things the development of the "communicative display skin" for Peter Cook's Kunsthaus in Graz.
The participants in this lecture will talk about their projects and about developments that await us in this field.
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