Archinect - News

A solar-powered media façade that ‘consumes only as much energy as it produces’

2023-07-06T11:32:00-04:00

A team comprising iart, AMDL CIRCLE, and Michele De Lucchi has created a ‘zero-energy media façade’ for the Novartis Pavilion in Basel, Switzerland. Combining PV panels and LEDs, the façade is described by the team as “illustrating the potential of organic photovoltaics in architecture.”

Photo credit: iart – studio for media architectures

Photo credit: Laurids Jensen

The façade features 10,000 diamond-shaped solar modules with LED lights embedded within that shine outwards as well as inwards onto the pavilion’s metal shell. The reflection of the metal shell creates a shimmer through the semi-transparent solar modules, resulting in a multi-layered membrane for displaying content.

Photo credit: iart – studio for media architectures

The display only consumes as much electrical energy as it is capable of producing through carbon-based organic solar modules that were custom-made for the project. The modules were ideal for the pavilion’s dom...

Watch Las Vegas’ MSG Sphere light up for Fourth of July debut

2023-07-05T18:11:00-04:00

At 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, it’s being billed as the world’s largest spherical structure. Its bowl-shaped theater reportedly contains the world’s highest-resolution wraparound LED screen. And its exterior is fitted with 1.2 million hockey puck-sized LEDs that can be programmed to flash dynamic imagery on a massive scale – again, reportedly the world’s largest. It was fully illuminated for the first time Tuesday night to celebrate the Fourth of July.

The venue doesn’t officially debut until late September with the beginning of U2’s special residency. The sphere will blast tunes from its hyper-customizable 164,000-speaker audio system, which somehow can even direct specific languages to certain parts of the audience.

Video courtesy of Sphere/YouTube

Testing of its eye-burning extierior didn’t commence until just last week. In a press statement, Sphere Entertainment SVP Guy Barnett called it “living architecture, and unlike anything that exists anywhere in the world.”

Scientists Develop Technique to Improve Flexible, Conductive, Transparent Glass

2014-06-26T19:01:00-04:00

A new technique developed by a Binghamton University physicist and his colleagues will improve the quality of flexible, conductive, transparent glass. (The sort that's needed for Minority Report-style giant computer displays.)[...] Creating a more reliable production process for a-IGZO will save electronics manufacturers money. It could also reduce energy use, as a fully transparent display can take advantage of ambient light and does not require as much backlighting.

Advances in technologies such as this one will enable glass to go beyond transparency and become screens, with the potential to radically change architecture and urbanism. A future in which windows, doors, and even walls could stream movies or display art is fast approaching. LED and LCD screens have already become ubiquitous in many cities for advertising. And in Beijing, screens are being used to display sunrises because air pollution is so bad that the skies are almost perpetually gray – a reminder that cool technology doesn't alone make a for a sci-fi utopia.

A Digitally Inspired Veil, Intended to Save Lives, Appears at N.Y.U. Library

2012-08-20T17:06:00-04:00

Among facets that critics may seize upon — and, this being N.Y.U., there will certainly be critics — is that the screens express technology’s new primacy, all but obscuring traditional forms of scholarship behind a cascade of random data. Critics may also discern a feeling of defeat in having to undertake such a fundamental alteration in the hope of saving students’ lives.