HyperSurface

• The interaction between humans and the

computer through interface has changed
the role of building walls from a protective
structure against the outer environment to an
information screen.

• The surface of the building utilizes sensors

to convert and deliver information in order
to respond to the change in the outer
environment, acting as an organism (Kim
&Jung, 2001).

• This sleek stratum package design that

hides this ‘hypersurface’ technology
signifies that the building surface in modern
GreenPix, the largest screen in the world
architecture comes with another existential
meaning other than the traditional decorative
functions.
 Stephen Perella, an architectural theorist coined a
production typology termed HyperSurface architecture.

Perella wanted to think through the infusion of form with media

and media with form to work between the two, or as he
argued, from “the middle-out.”
HyperSurface

Projects produced as a result of the new relations and affects between

media and topological surfaces in architecture.

Relation between form and image.

A system of exchange.
The division between real and virtual, an operative division, is
illusory. The virtual is an extension of ourselves into a
manufactured and constructed space. It is not a separate space
but an extrusion of being. The virtual recreates the specific and
local conditions of our bodies and projects.

Doha Tower, Qatar/ Ateliers Jean Nouvel

 HyperSurfaces
A hypersurface is a threshold whereby the density of difference
in an interface becomes vital, self-configuring and auto-poietic.

Interface transforms from a transparent tool into a surface

inscribed with multiple, disparate forces.

The absorption of difference and transferal of forces create a

hyper surface, an architectural manifestation connecting life
forces with emergent figures.
 BIX installationthe Kunsthaus Art Gallery
HyperSurfaces , Austria

A communicative display skin, a very large low resolution light & media
façade for the kunsthaus art gallery

Interactivity of the façade is connected with the inner usage of the museum
and the façade changes according to the mass movement inside it.

The light rings are not new but the idea to create a digital display
with conventional fluorescent lamps is the innovative approach.
 HyperSurfaces
MOODWALL AMSTERDAM
The Moodwall is 24 meters long and consists of 2500 LED lights, a ribbed
semi‐transparent wall. This was a part of the project of municipality to make
those spaces safer.
The wall reacts on anyone who passes by with changes of the
colors and/or moving of the images.
 HyperSurfaces
Aegis Hyposurface by deCOI, Mark
Goulthorpe

The triangular shape was connected in

the head of the piston. These pistons,
which are very fast in their open/close
process, Team head also a programmer
who programmed the pistons movement
into a wave or letters or something
spontaneous
People enjoy touching and standing next to
the wall so that it can push them away.
 Aegis Hyposurface by deCOI, Mark
Goulthorpe
HyperSurfaces

Aegis Hyposurface: physically reconfigurable 3D

screens, producing precise and high speed
deformation across a fluid surface. Media panel/wall
Dynamically variable, tactile ‘informatic ’
surfaces, where information translates into form.
Surface topology is infinitely variable. It deploys
sophisticated 3D patterning-in-time, running text,
graphics, video images in relief using generative
algorithmic program.
 HyperSurface
• The walls will respond to the environment in two ways - by visual and audio input.
• The Halo Wall will record and visualise the soundscape at the Customs House
forecourt, and depending on the sound and audio atmosphere the city and its citizens
produce and translate this sound into a mix of colours and light patterns.
The Euphonious Mobius will ‘see’ visitors standing in front of the
screen and through the use of a camera and developed software respond to their
movements and actions. Thus both installations invite visitors to interact - either in an
audio or visual way.
For the first time both state-of-the-art digital communication platforms, QR (Quick
Response) code and AR (Augmented Reality) code are combined in one marker. By
studying the properties of QR markers and AR markers we were able to combine them in
one and the same marker. This allows visitors to interact with their Smartphone either via
an QR reader in order to get QR based

INTER-ACTION
Essay DR ANURADHA CHATTERJEE
 Liquid Architectre

klaus enrique © 2007-2013

Liquid Architecture
A liquid architecture is an architecture whose form is
contingent on the interests of the beholder; it is
an architecture that opens to welcome you and
closes to defend you; it is an architecture without
doors and hallways, where the next room is always
where it needs to be and what it needs to be.
 Liquid Architecture
The term ‘liquid architecture’ was coined by Marcos Novak. He is the founder of
RealityLab, the Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments, at the Advanced
Design Research Program (ADRP) at the School of Architecture at the University of
Texas at Austin.

This is in fact the first faculty devoted to the study of virtual space as autonomous
architectural space. Novak is an architect, artist, composer, and theorist
investigating actual, virtual and mutant intelligent environments. Furthermore, his
personal research is situated in the field of algorithmic compositions, cyberspace, and
the relationship of architecture to music.

In the view of Novak, cyberspace is the ideal realm in which the benefits of digitally
separating data, information, and form can be intensively maximized.

The core of its arguments leads back to the possibility that by reducing selves, forms,
objects and processes, new and unsuspected phenomena can be investigated.

This representation reduced to primarily binary streams, could thus permit the discovery of
previously invisible relations in this data, simply by modifying the applied mapping
techniques.
infoscape.org
 Liquid Architecture
Novak proves to be convinced that conceptually, cyberspace is architecture, cyberspace
has architecture and cyberspace contains architecture. Hereby, the traditional conception
of these terms changes considerably.

Architecture, which is normally understood in the context of the city and all its implied
metaphors, shifts towards the abstract structure of relationships, connections and
associations of appearances and accommodations.
The image of the relationship of human to information will be inverted, as humans will
now be placed within the information space itself. But then also, these manifestations of
‘landscapes’ and scattered ‘objects’ are considered as an architectural problem. Marcos
Novak refers to cyberspace as a habitat for the imagination, as well as a habitat of the
imagination.

Novak uses the term ‘liquid’ to mean animistic, animated, metamorphic, as well as the
crossing of many categorical boundaries. Animism suggests that entities have a ‘spirit’
that tries to guide their own behaviour.
Animation in turn means the capability to change the location through time.
Metamorphosis adds the change of form, through time or Space.
He tries to clarify this concept further as follows:
“It can take different forms. Its essence is not invested in a particular form. It can ‘adjust’.”
infoscape.org
 Liquid Architecture
The nature of this virtual world is considered to be information, and the art
of the world is consequently the investigation of the data. In this space, the boundaries
of ‘how’ information can be perceived are thoroughly investigated in an architectural
manner.
Therefore, various different types of media are processed and combined
through an electronic algorithmic translator, generating form towards as much human
sensorial modalities as possible. This lead to the fact that for the first time in history, the
architect is called to design not the object, but the principles by which the object is
generated and varied in time.

His liquid architecture requires much more than just variations of a theme, as it
calls for the invention of ‘something’ equivalent to a ‘grand tradition’ of architecture.
This should then lead to: “a continuum of edifices, smoothly evolving in both space and
time.

Judgements of a building’s ‘performance’ become akin to the evaluation of dance and

theatre.” Even the comparison to ‘a symphony in space’ seems not to be sufficient, as
liquid architecture never can be repeated but instead continues to develop.

NOVAK, MARCOS,
infoscape.org Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace,
 Liquid Architecture
Poetics
Novak thinks it is possible that a poetic composition could be the structuring system for the generation of form.
Poetic systems such as music, dance, or lyrics are taken and transformed into the generators of form in a
synthesized virtual world. Structures and primitives of the communicated representation of many different media
types could thus be ‘morphed’ and transformed into a single space and place, as a sort of immersive symbolic
database.

Music
As extension to these theories of interchangeable media, the generation of form is also applied to music
and cinema, resulting into the phenomena of navigable music and habitable theatre. The structuring of a
certain database can be influenced by themes in music so that forms can visually abstract their originating
composition. Several characteristics of sounds can be mapped, out of which functions and variables can be
created which subsequently produce simple more dimensional figures. Such a conception of architectural
space has the advantage of being extremely compact, since a single mathematical expression can be
expanded to become a fully formed chamber.

Music is then understood as a single object in time: it has a beginning and an end, a plan or a section can
be sorted out, and it even can be graphed out. This leads to the idea that a whole musical composition can
be seen as a landscape, capable to allow and extract many unique trajectories through it. The whole
organisation is then based on a matrix of infinite possibilities and is promised to evoke any sort emotion
that conventional music could, because it is based on the discovery of interesting nodes in the matrix.

infoscape.org
 Liquid Architecture
Cinema
As any media can be mapped in this way, the meaning of it can be multiplied, compressed in one single
representation. Another possible example is the media of cinema that possesses the same sort of linearity
as music does. Inhabitable cinema in turn implies the possibility of artificial and discontinuous
environments, turning the cinema of the future into a landscape of opportunity. Furthermore, the same
could be done with dance, by digitally recording movement after which this data could be morphed into a
definable construct. All this should then lead into the notion that the landscape of data is an abstraction that
makes the information much more comprehensible.

Time
The design of mechanisms and algorithms of animation and interactivity for every act of architecture is
required. Consequently, the concept of time must mathematically be added to the list of active parameters
of which architecture is a function. This notion brings Novak back to the already mentioned theory of
Bergson, in which objects out of place, time, or plot are able to colour a scene with their probable histories
or futures.

infoscape.org
 Liquid Architecture
Sampling

For Novak, the world is until today solely understood through the process of sampling, as even the cognitive
mechanisms of the body’s nervous system have to translate raw input of numerous sources into some kind of
recognizable and meaningful pattern.

‘Reality’ becomes thus segmented into intervals and then back reconstituted to fit a human understanding,
creating in fact a continuous illusion. The concept of sampling implies furthermore the existence of a field to be
sampled, a sample rate or frequency, and a sampling resolution or sensitivity. Looking at the world as a field is
completely different from understanding it in terms of dialectic, solids, or voids.

Here, the distinction of existence is not considered as binary, but made by the concept of degree. Capturing an
object’s boundary is then simply the reconstructed contour of an arbitrarily chosen value out of the collection of all
possible data points. As an essential characteristic, changing the three features of the sampling-mechanism or the
source of the data replaces the shaped and perceived world with complete new ones.

The concept plan is furthermore considered as dead and inappropriate to capture the dynamic flows of the new
trajectories, waves, and holes. It is then even so, that we already inhabit an invisible world of shapes, an
architecture of latent information, ready to be seen, captured, and creatively visualised.

infoscape.org
 Liquid Architecture
Transmission

The astonishing capacity of the electronic net surrounding the planet to carry information is just being grasped.
Meanwhile however, its potential is still being restricted by the present limits of bandwidth. It is thus unlikely and
against the insights of distributed computing, to implement a central computer system to manufacture one
reality for many participants.

The concept that will emerge is quite the opposite: each user will receive an electronic and compressed
description of the world and information about the state and actions of all other participants. Each participant’s
local machine will then synthesize a version of the shared reality that is similar to, but not necessarily identical
with, the one the others perceive. Each location is thus considered independent, and yet necessary to make a
larger reality possible.

Obviously, to accomplish this task the technique of simple compression is insufficient, since it imposes the same
limit of resolution for all participants, regardless of their computational and communicational resources. Instead,
it is not the object itself, but its genetic code that will be transmitted, as it possesses all information for its
generation regardless of neither location nor resources.

infoscape.org NOVAK, MARCOS, Transmitting Architecture

www.ctheory.com
 Liquid Architecture
Marcos Novak’s liquid architecture is clearly a dematerialised architecture, an
architecture designed as much in time as in space, changing interactively as a function
of duration, use, and external influence, and it is described in a compact coded notation.
He sees architecture deliberately much further than the process of building alone in his
long search for architectural sign systems that should both be spatial and
encompassing.
This technique should lead to the application of architectural typologies that will
influence the notion of how people will use future virtual spaces. He is also able to
generate architectural form out of separate observed phenomena, although he still
strongly emphasizes the notion of electronically building structures that are still
meaningful and useful in the physical world. For this purpose, he is obliged to struggle
with the technique of inserting knowledge and formal constraints into the growing
construction itself.

infoscape.org
 Liquid Architecture
In 1984, William Gibson created the term “cyberspace.” In his novel Neuromancer, Gibson
used this new term for environments, made possible by the networking of computers, where
characters inhabited virtually. His notion of an inhabitable or immersive terrain, which exists in
the connections between computer networks, is a fluid architectural space that can be expanded
endlessly through a kind of discontinuous flood of images. Here is how Gibson describes this
terrain:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate

operators in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A
graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human
system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of
the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding….

And that is the point from which Marcos Novak picks up. Novak took Gibson’s
description of virtual environments as the starting point for his own theoretical and artistic
explorations. The implication of his “liquid architectures in cyberspace” was to shift the notion of
space to include new attitudes toward the organization of information. In cyberspace, spaces
become programmable; environments become fluid. The architect/artist that designs these
immersive fluid environments is, then, transcending the laws of the physical world, such as laws
of force and gravity. Viewers no longer respond to the environment. It is the architectural forms,
built in cyberspace, that are now responsive to the viewer.

LIQUID ARCHITECTURES:
MARCOS NOVAK’S TERRITORY OF INFORMATION Camile A. Silva
 Liquid Architecture LIQUID ARCHITECTURES:
Algorithms: Tools for Creation MARCOS NOVAK’S TERRITORY OF INFORMATION Camile A. Silva

Following is a brief description and illustration of how Novak’s “liquid architectures” are generated.
His compositions are basically created by a generic algorithm followed by processes of
superimposition, masking, and filtering to make this informational creation visible as variations.
After superimposing information, Novak merges the algorithmic composition with scanned data.

The new image reveals new patterns, new structures of images. With further image processing, he
acquires new variations of image. Then, he maps a three-dimensional algorithmic composition onto
cyberspace .Finally, “liquid architectures” are revealed in two algorithmic compositions: one
with variations of information, another as a three dimensional shape .In different times and
spaces, “liquid architectures” presents new variations
 Liquid Architecture
However, the variations are not possible without one’s interaction, one’s immersion into
the same cyberspace of “liquid architectures.” Novak uses virtual reality technologies never
before available to artists or architects to make this happen, again using algorithms.

He seemed to believe that such a concept would free architecture from the confinements of
earlier adopted terms, of biased terms, such as functionality and aesthetics. After all, he wanted
architecture to be poetic, to emerge from the fluidity of ideas. “Liquid architectures” are then easily
associated with cyberspace, immersion, and virtual reality. But, according to Novak, those are not
the only possible associations. LIQUID ARCHITECTURES:
MARCOS NOVAK’S TERRITORY OF INFORMATION Camile A. Silva