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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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.

I am currently working up some site character studies along with material and architectural precedents in order to effectively explain my outline scheme for Monday’s crit. This is a high-res photo montage of Baker’s Row looking south comprising some twenty images.

The study looks at the area between Waterloo and Tower Bridge, a 3km stretch of the River Thames. The calculations are based on of each one of the floating structures (barges etc) that currently populate the river being converted to food production.

This is the beginnings of my 3D investigation; each element has been modelled quite spontaneously based upon the programme requirement. Some of these are flexible, others bespoke i.e. some are mildly reconfigurable networked ‘event’ spaces, whereas others are far more specific in their architecture.

These two sheets will eventually be ‘wired’ together (see sketch below) to demonstrate the potential for semantic city feeds that visualise the rhythms and fluctuations of the city. With suitable annotation they will also help to illustrate the open event initiative over time; the whole idea is that these patterns help to influence and inform a new urban cross-programming.

If I am able to convert the dataset into a 3D visualisation I could then potentially augment this over the digital city network map for an interactive exhibit.