Imagine architecture that changes as information flows through it.
Your office walls, a teeming symphony of diffused color and light, shimmer like a display of Northern Lights. As you send a message to an assistant outside your office door, the colors arc and flash. The liquid walls speak their ever-changing electronic tones and abstract images, as information unrelated to you passes through the building. Perhaps someone in Paraguay is teleconferencing to a meeting room somewhere deep on another floor.
Historically, architecture has been slow to reflect the constant philosophic and technological changes within a society. Stephen Perrella, designer at the University of Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, and his team are creating "enculturated architecture" - a design philosophy responsive to the digital information that surrounds us, and each individual's integral role in the creation and dissemination of that information.
What results is a structure that is not permanent or fixed, but one that changes with each bit of information passing through it; a building that is never the same from moment to moment, much like information and time itself.
For now, the effect of Perrella's vision, self-titled "electrotecture," is imagined in a digital collage (a portion of an imagined wall is pictured here). In the future, however, Perrella's structures will be as real as those built today. External and internal surfaces will integrate circuits and sensors - gadgetry built into the walls that will act as satellite dishes of sorts, gathering every digital impulse of information and communication passing through the structure, transforming them into abstract, fluid "pictures" - an "imaging wallpaper" that depicts the digital information surrounding it.
No longer strictly theoretical, Perrella's project has received interest from professional architects and urban developers alike. Perrella's organization - Studio AEM (or Architecture at the End of Metaphysics) - is currently perfecting their electronic model for an upcoming competition in Japan titled "Super Structure."
Realization of Perrella's designs may be less than a decade away. His group is currently exploring the capabilities of Cholesteryl Myristate - a key component of liquid crystals and future LCD technology. It is hoped that through phase transitions (or molecular changes due to temperature), this or similar compounds will be able to produce the nascent electrotecture effects within the surfaces of an actual structure - a structure that will represent each individual's integral role within the swirling maelstroms of our very own walls.
Stephen Perrella/Tony Wong - Studio AEM: +1 (212) 854 5885 (sp43@columbia.edu).
