website: http://lakeforms.tumblr.com/

LakeForms is a dynamic interactive public pavilion that invites residents and visitors into the Convention Center plaza, where they can relax, explore and learn about Minneapolis’s urban lakes.  The pavilion is a digitally enhanced scale model of the lakes’ underwater topography.  Their individual topographies are inverted and joined together to create a single sweeping, curvilinear form that will be a striking and innovative architectural presence in downtown Minneapolis.  Using custom-built “smart buoys” deployed in the lakes to gather data, the interior of the pavilion is transformed into an information rich environment, featuring a light display and soundscape about the lake’s ecology and summer use.

LakeForms responds to the site-specific and eco-focused themes of the Art in the Plaza: Creative City Challenge.  By symbolically bringing the lakes into the urban core, it realizes the city’s Convention and Visitors Association’s tagline, “City by Nature.”  Visitors will have a chance to physically relax upon and enter a rendition of the city’s urban lakes, which are the city’s heart.  The extension of the plaza lawn up into the pavilion structure draws attention to the city’s extensive green spaces and illustrates the city’s symbiotic relationship to nature.

The Pavilion

The pavilion’s form is derived from a scale model of the lakes’ underwater topography, and it is digitally fabricated out of 100% recycled wood-plastic composite material.  The structure straddles the existing walkway leading to and from the Convention Center, preserving existing circulation patterns, and it functions as a gateway portal, inviting visitors into the plaza and guiding them to their destinations.  The structural ribs begin as embedded planters in the plaza surface and sweep upwards to form the pavilion enclosure.  Both the interior and the exterior of the pavilion are habitable: the inside provides a shaded space to gather during hot summer days, and the exterior of the pavilion is a greened extension of the plaza’s lawn, providing a comfortable surface for seating and play.  The character of the pavilion changes subtly from June to September as the vegetation grows throughout the summer months.  The site-specificity of the form extends beyond its reference to Minneapolis’s lakes.  It also evokes the Convention Center domes and burial mounds that are found throughout the Upper Midwest. 

Smart Buoys

The interior of the pavilion offers an interactive, eco-focused, and information rich environment, consisting of a light display and soundscape, which illustrate the changing ecology and use of Minneapolis’s urban lakes over the summer season.  The data for this environment is collected by a series of custom-built “smart buoys” that wirelessly transmit real-time audio and data from the lakes.  At minimum, we envision sensor data, such as wind-speed and water temperature, and a real-time audio feed, which collects recordings from the lakes’ surface and banks, such as the sounds of swimming and water splashing, laughter, and boating noises.  Using MAX/MSP, the sensor data and audio recordings are collaged into a musical soundscape and light display manually refined by the artists.  Finally, given the large numbers of visitors to Minneapolis’s urban lakes over the summer, the buoys themselves also serve to draw considerable attention to LakeForms in high traffic off-site locations.