I have begun to explore the elements of my programme that are to integrate with certain layers of the digital city as the spatial experience of my building will be defined not only by the physical architectural language but also through the use of virtual sensory ephemera. Two venerable precedents in this respect are of course the Blur Building (2002) by Diller and Scofidio and the Philips Pavilion (1958) by Le Corbusier.

The Philips pavilion – conceived for the 1958 Expo – was designed primarily by Iannis Xenakis, a Greek architect and experimental composer. The image below is a graph of Xenakis’ Metastaseis: opening glissandi which clearly references the Philips Pavilion. The audio sample beneath that is an extract.

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The Philips Pavilion presented a collage liturgy for twentieth-century humankind, dependent on electricity instead of daylight and on virtual perspectives in place of terrestrial views.

[source: Marc Treib, Space Calculated in Seconds, Princeton, 1996, p. 3]

I would like to explore an architecture that enables, in part, a similar experience although it would instead draw upon ‘artefacts’ – both contemporary and historical – of the digital city. I investigated a similar idea with my Memorial Memory sequence, which was also turned into an implied augmentation for the closing seconds of my first Primer film. There is also a scene during my City 2.0 film that depicts a parade of 1932 from the British Pathe news archive turning the same corner in Cardiff.

Over forty years later, Diller and Scofidio’s Blur Building was a unique sensory experience but it also featured technologically advanced ’brain coats’ – wearable raincoats with wireless communication devices that would inform an indication of either positive or negative affinity between different visitors, through colour change and sound, depending on an individual’s response to a predefined set of questions, i.e. Prince or Puccini.

I would therefore like to push this theme further by proposing that the interaction and ‘affinity’ could instead occur seamlessly via the Web, which isn’t so far-fetched considering the advent of Web 2.0 in 2004. Information specific to a given user could be pushed and exhibited interactively from a range of user content-creation sources.

A bit of an interlude… I am interested in recording my design development over time; an attempt to to convey some of the ‘invisible’ development process work prevalent in digital design. This is a simple (therefore not particularly interesting) test piece that shows the construction of a photographic elevation over forty minutes. I will be using this primarily to record the evolution of my scheme design in 3D, the end result may or may not prove worthwhile.

An updated programme diagram that includes relative areas prior to working in 3D.

This is my new city feed pipe diagram which describes the method for accumulating the dataset from a range of twenty existing Web resources. The current design fetches, regularises and truncates before filtering and sorting. The output is based on a 365 day time period. Theoretically, this would power the City Dynamics visualisation above.

Another extract from the sketchbook…this week will be spent formally planning my building. I seem to be developing a good mental image but will be interested to see how it pans out when I begin arranging the programme.