"To understand the concept of digital water, imagine something like an inkjet printer on a large scale, which controls droplets of falling water," explains Carlo Ratti, head of MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory...

The facade of the water pavilion will be like a very large display, with text, letters, and interactive patterns. "You could throw a ball at the wall, and then see an open circle drop down to meet it precisely where and when its trajectory intersected the water surface. And, with suitable programming, touching the water surface at any point can propagate patterns horizontally, along the wall, to other locations," Mitchell explains.

Equipped with suitable sensors, Water Walls can detect the approach of people and, "like the Red Sea for Moses, open up to allow passage through at any point," said (William J. Mitchell, head of MIT's Design Laboratory and former Dean of Architecture at MIT). "This provocatively subverts the fundamental architectural conception of an opening as something, like a door, found at a fixed location."

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:45:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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