BIX Matrix

realities : united
Kunsthaus Graz
Austria

Top
Looking a little like the body of
an animal, the biomorphic
structure of the new
Kunsthaus in Graz floats above
a glass foyer. More than 1,200
individually shaped, opaque,
acrylic glass panels wrap the
whole volume of the building
like a skin. realities:united
created BIX matrix, an
integrated media technology
skin for the building, which
displays a constantly changing
texture of images and displays
designed by artists and
curators.

Bottom
The Kunsthaus’ media facade
faces the river and the city
centre, a part-transparent,
part-opaque electronic
membrane across the
building’s eastern facade. On
the roof is a viewing gallery,
and to the left an original iron-
framed structure converted
into exhibition space.

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Top left
The BIX matrix electronic skin
is made up of 930 light rings
covering an area 20 metres
high and 40 metres wide, on
which low-resolution images,
films and animations are
presented. On the ground floor
is a glazed café area facing the
river.
Top right
Exploded visualisation of the
BIX matrix showing the
integration of architecture,
technology and message.
Middle right
Detail of one of the 930
fluorescent light rings, a
conventional fluorescent lamp
of 40 watts with a diameter of
40 centimetres. Its brightness
can be adjusted at an infinite
variability of 20 frames per
second, so that each lamp acts
as a pixel. The rings form their
own layer beneath the
building’s acrylic glass panel
surface.
Bottom right
Implementation planning
of the BIX matrix.
Electronic surfaces to
buildings that carry sounds
and imagery are not new in
a world of high-technology
billboards. However, BIX
Matrix, writes Lucy
Bullivant, is integral to the
architecture of the
Kunsthaus in Graz – an
innovative and low-tech skin
with its own software for
artists and curators to use.
Autumn 2003 heralded the birth of a new
building, biomorphic in structure with a
symbiotic interactive architectural element. The
opening of the eagerly awaited Kunsthaus in
Graz, Austria, designed by architects Peter
Cook (co-founder of Archigram and, until 2004,
chairman of the Bartlett School of Architecture,
UCL) and Colin Fournier, professor of architecture
and urbanism at the Bartlett, synthesises an
innovative language of form with the historical
ambience of the western side of this
exceptionally well-preserved city. Graz Altstad
(the old part of the town) was a previously
disadvantaged district recently designated a
UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Bringing a major
permanent contemporary cultural focus to the
area, the compact Kunsthaus radically redefines
its public spaces.
But apart from this, while the new Kunsthaus
is conceived aesthetically as a ‘black box of
hidden tricks’, its outer skin, which faces the river and
the city centre with the Schlossberg (castle hill) in the
background, is a part-transparent, part-opaque
electronic membrane never previously realised in this
form. Under the building’s acrylic facade on the river
side is an intermediate electronic membrane on top of
a mesh layer forming the internal covering. Designed
by the Berlin-based architects realities:united1 led by
Jan and Tim Edler, it is a unique, effective and
imaginative use of technology, a 900-square-metre
media skin called BIX2 (big pixels) integrating
architecture, technology and visual message, used
as an instrument and platform for artistic production
in a new level of mediation.
‘In our designs we synchronise architecture,
information technology and communication content
to develop design concepts, technologies and action
strategies that unite the material “old” reality with
the immaterial “new” realities, which increasingly
overlay and augment the present,’ say realities:united.
‘Audiovisual media, global communications and
information networks and computer interfaces
constitute a synthetic fabric that coats the appearance
of the everyday world … we must begin to develop truly
integrative patterns for design, semantic exchange
and actual utilisation.’
BIX is actually quite a low-tech method using 930
circular fluorescent 40-watt light-ring tubes integrated
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Top left
Prototype of the BIX matrix.
Top right
Screenshots of the BIX
Simulator, a software tool
designed by realities:united to
enable artists to examine the
results of their productions on
a real-time 3-D computer
simulation of the Kunsthaus,
making sure the productions
adapt to the large scale, the
complex geometry and the
course resolution of the facade
display.
Bottom right
Hidden behind the acrylic
glass facade, only the active
light rings are visible, with the
rest disguised, blurring the
edges of the installation.
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into each section of the facade, mounted in
between the acrylic and the membrane. As a
result, the resolution of the matrix is very low,
with only 930 pixels – 0.2 per cent of the pixels
in a conventional TV screen – that are black and
white. However, the solution allows the design
to be fully integrated into the architecture.
Using conventional big-screen display
technology, and assuming the same budget,
the surface area would have needed to have
been a hundred times smaller.
Each ring of light functions as a pixel centrally
controlled by computer. The brightness of the
lamps can be individually adjusted at an infinite
variability with 20 frames/second, which allows
images, films, animations and text to be displayed,
transforming the Kunsthaus's skin into a giant
low-resolution computer display3 visible from a
considerable distance within the city.
At night the form disappears, leaving the
dancing light patterns to work their magic.
Together they turn the blue bubble into a low-
resolution screen that can display simple image
sequences and varying text streams. Up close,
they become totally abstract. realities:united
sees the relative coarseness and
monochromacity of the visuals as an
advantageous limitation, for new technology of
large screens ages extremely fast, and this
solution saves constant upgrading and costs.
Software tools evolved as part of the project.
BIX Director allows the user to compose a
program to be shown on the facade, and BIX
Simulator enables artists to look at the results
of their productions on a real-time 3-D
computer simulation. The tools were a key
aspect of the project because they make the
production of artistic content possible, at a large
scale and for public laboratory experiments.
Understandably, the architects hoped the
Kunsthaus curators would not use it for
advertising; they prefer the idea of a media
facility as an urban playground for the public, but run
by architects. ’Architects need to develop a culture of
the changing facade,’ say the Edlers.
The Kunsthaus is planned as a multidisciplinary
venue for exhibitions, events and other means of
presenting art, new media and photography. A glass-
walled ground floor with a bar, function rooms and
amenities leading off the Kunsthaus foyer heralds the
start of the moving ramp travelator to the upper
exhibition spaces and studio for electronic art. Like a
bubble of air, the bluish acrylic skin of the Kunsthaus
floats above its glass-walled ground floor. Spanning
up to 60 metres in width, the biomorphic construction
envelops two large exhibition spaces without additional
supports. The skin is made of 1,200 panels of 2-
centimetre translucent blue Plexiglass, a pliable acrylic
plastic sheet, held in place on a triangulated steel-grid
structure by a custom-designed clamp system made
using computer-aided manufacture. As a symbiotic part
of this structure, BIX enables the institution to present
a transparency of information and content, and to
further ‘develop methods for dynamic communication
between building and surroundings, between content
and outside perception’, explain the architects.
Peter Pakesch, artistic director of the Kunsthaus,
inaugurated the building’s intelligent ‘skin’ promisingly
with Eintönen (tuning in), a series of sound installations
synchronised with the lighting program (for instance,
by Max Neuhaus), to set the mood for the opening

Above
An audiovisual artwork plays
on the facade of the
Kunsthaus, transforming it
into a low-resolution screen
displaying simple image
sequences. It can also carry
varying text streams.
Notes
1 www.realities-united.com.
2 www.bix.at.
3 A 10-minute video
documentary about BIX can be
viewed at
rtsp://media.heimat.de/r/e/rea
lu_bix_fulldocu_352ns.rm.
exhibition ‘Einbildung’. The artistic roll call for
the exhibition included Angela Bulloch, Jan
Dibbets, Olafur Eliasson and Bridget Riley, and
it took perception as its theme, in the sense of
the creative science of the processes within
our brains that create images and ideas.
realities:united approved of these initial efforts.
The company is well aware that the relationship
between architecture and its facade has long
been a topic for debate, and believes that
‘architecture is not an episodic instrument but
a performative act that happens all the time’.
Their collaboration has brought a modus
operandi for the architecture that enables it to
transmit and radiate artistic activities within the
city that ‘you read like a clock tower’. The light
matrix is an amorphous zone tailored to the
complex shape of the building, fading away at
the edges, giving the impression that the
biomorphic shape creates the light patterns
from within itself. realities:united describes the
installation as ‘an architectural enabler’, and
emails to the company from all over the world
testify to its popularity. BIX’s credibility as a
venture was such that it won over the judges of
the German Art Directors Club, an advertising
rather than architectural professional body, who
selected it for a ‘Golden Nail’ award in 2004, the
first time a project in the ‘communication in
space/cultural projects’ had been given such an
award.
There have been a few complaints that the program
shown on the facade, which was evolved by the
Kunsthaus curators, is not changed often enough.
realities:united’s deep research into BIX’s potentials
meant they had confidence in proposing to take on this
curatorial role, but the content has been managed in-
house since the opening. BIX is a new medium in terms
of resolution, scale, format and urban setting, and it is
clear that it will take a while before curators and artists
learn how to fully exploit its potentials.
The architecture of the Kunsthaus represents – at a
point in architectural history when there is maximum
design freedom – an intentional experiment rather than
a formula. It is iconic, but furthermore intends to be
a statement typifying a more open form of European
architecture – and artistic mediation. As Cook explains,
'We are episodic, not polemical.’ His and Fournier’s
architecture is ‘quite theatrical, with a sequence of
events and revelations. It shouldn't be seen as static.’
The pair always envisaged their facade as a
chameleonic, interactive skin, bringing the art inside to
the urban surface, just as Rogers and Piano anticipated
a high degree of flexibility in the image of the Pompidou
Centre in Paris. What they have in common is a design
solution that allows for the life of the building to
contribute to its meaning, rather than being an
overarching aesthetic formula visitors take in passively.
The Kunsthaus’ fusion of architecture and design
software, and media technology, defines a new standard
in architecture – an approach that is likely to be a guiding
strength of many future urban building schemes. 4
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