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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Living Light
Soo-In Yang,
The Living,
David Benjamin
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“Living Light” is a building envelope of the future, a permanent outdoor pavilion in a park in Seoul, and a piece of architecture that metamorphoses in response to air-quality data and public interest in the environment. People can text-message the building and it will text them back.
The project combines issues of environmental quality and public awareness with a dynamic building-scale interface to our shared interests and collective concerns. The structure in a public park not only provides a canopy and a tactile enclosure, it also suggests that a building envelope itself can become a new kind of public space.
The envelope of the pavilion is a giant map of the city with neighborhood boundaries re-drawn based on existing sensors of the Korean Ministry of Environment—each shape in this new map encloses the air closest to one of the sensors. The map illuminates to become an interactive, environmental layer of information.
As people observe and interact, the envelope transforms in three ways. First, the neighborhoods light up if their air quality is better today than last year. Second, every hour, the map goes dark and the neighborhoods light up in order of the best current air quality to worst. Third, people can send a text message with a Zip code to the “Living Light” hotline, receive a reply with the Zip code’s real-time air quality, and trigger one of the panels to blink. More blinking means more public interest in the environment.
The unusual structural frame of the pavilion was designed by re-drawing the city map to reflect existing sensor stations and by running a process of automated optimization. In this process, we generated and evaluated 25,000 possible designs based on two goals—best structural performance and least amount of material.
Links: www.livinglightseoul.net
The project combines issues of environmental quality and public awareness with a dynamic building-scale interface to our shared interests and collective concerns. The structure in a public park not only provides a canopy and a tactile enclosure, it also suggests that a building envelope itself can become a new kind of public space.
The envelope of the pavilion is a giant map of the city with neighborhood boundaries re-drawn based on existing sensors of the Korean Ministry of Environment—each shape in this new map encloses the air closest to one of the sensors. The map illuminates to become an interactive, environmental layer of information.
As people observe and interact, the envelope transforms in three ways. First, the neighborhoods light up if their air quality is better today than last year. Second, every hour, the map goes dark and the neighborhoods light up in order of the best current air quality to worst. Third, people can send a text message with a Zip code to the “Living Light” hotline, receive a reply with the Zip code’s real-time air quality, and trigger one of the panels to blink. More blinking means more public interest in the environment.
The unusual structural frame of the pavilion was designed by re-drawing the city map to reflect existing sensor stations and by running a process of automated optimization. In this process, we generated and evaluated 25,000 possible designs based on two goals—best structural performance and least amount of material.
Links: www.livinglightseoul.net
Commissioned by Seoul City Gallery and the Municipal Government of the City of Seoul. Developed in association with the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
The Living. David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang created The Living in 2004 and launched the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University in 2005. The practice and the lab emphasize open source research and design through prototyping. Benjamin graduated from Harvard with a BA in social studies and played in the rock band Push Kings. Yang graduated from Yonsei University with a BE in architectural engineering and managed the construction of apartment complexes in Seoul. Benjamin and Yang both received master of architecture degrees from Columbia University. They currently teach at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where they are directors of the Living Architecture Lab.