The project was part of the world exhibition, Expo 2010 Shanghai China. It was a collaboration between CAVI and the Center for Digital Urban Living at the Department of Information and Media Studies of Aarhus University, the architectural group, BIG, and the lighting company, Martin Professional.
Both the interior of The Danish Pavilion, where the visitors could view the Little Mermaid, bike paths, and Danish art, and the architecture were worth seeing. Because of the double-loop structure of the building, the facade was almost three hundred meters long, and from some angles appeared as two bands, one above the other. The pavilion balanced digital art, urban design, and architecture. The steel construction featured an outer wall perforated by translucent tubes that could be lid by full-color LED fixtures, forming an enormous media facade, sparkling with colors and light. This transformed the building into an architectural display that made the pavilion come alive at nightfall. An array of sensors monitored the intensity of the sunlight on the building, causing the building to adapt seamlessly to the light conditions throughout the day. Every night, during the late evening hours, a media show explored the screen-like potential of the facade by displaying dedicated content reflecting the spatial qualities of the somewhat unusual architecture. With the addition of LED lighting fixtures behind each tube, the facade became a large, low-resolution display, with tube-like pixels in an elongated, curved configuration.
In order to develop and test potential content for integrating such a non-standard display into a building, several custom-made design tools were developed. Each design tool addressed in its own way the different aspects of spatiality, scale, pixel form, and image formation.
Early in the process, a full-scale, wood model of a section of the facade was produced, which served as a mock-up for testing light fixtures and the quality of the individual pixels with respect to color and light intensity.
From the outset of the project it was obvious that the pattern of pixels on the building would impose special challenges and limitations on the design. Therefore, a tool was needed to test the perceptual possibilities of the facade pixels, in terms of their pattern, low resolution, and the specific geometry imposed by the illuminated tubes. This led to a simple, Flash-based software application that was capable of visualizing a small section of twenty-four of the total 627 columns of holes in the facade.
In order to obtain a better idea of how the varied content would work in full scale, a test was performed, projecting content on a wall of approximately 4 x 12 meters, in the backyard of CAVIs laboratory facilities. A virtual 3D model of the pavilion was also developed, including its nearly 4000 tubes. Finally, a physical 1:100 scale model of the building was 3D printed and used as projection screen for the multiple tests and variations of the virtual 3D model content.
Using various design visualization tools, a number of designs were tested and further developed, including slow-moving smoke, silhouettes of pedestrians and cyclists, Chinese characters, black-to-white gradients moving around the building, and a shimmering, noise-like surface, creating constantly evolving patterns on the facade. Because of the complex structure of the building as well as considerations for the artistic expression in the actual Shanghai EXPO space, it was necessary to postpone the completion of the design until this last-phase work could done on the actual building in Shanghai.
From CAVI’s perspective, EXPO Shanghai 2010 provided an opportunity to both design a media facade, and examine and analyze the impact and effects of the graphics on the screen. Furthermore, CAVI gained important know-how from developing software tools for the project and from investigating the challenges and experiences encountered when working on a project of this scale. Therefore, the project contributed to the development of CAVI’s forays into media facade design and research.
The Shanghai Expo was open for six months, and more than five million people visited The Danish Pavilion.
DENMARK PAVILION FACADE from Tobias Ebsen on Vimeo.
