Can buildings move? Aside from some gentle swaying in the wind, not really. That is unless the Trans-ports experiment succeeds in its ambition to produce a really moving architecture. Movement that is generated in part from the Internet. Thursday 24 February (15.00 CET) architect Kas Oosterhuis and critic Ole Bouman will present this project in the Rotterdam Architecture Institute. The event can be attended by surfing to the website or to the special ‘dialog space’ in Alpha World.
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Trans-ports features a data-driven construct which changes shape and content in real time. According to Oosterhuis and Bouman 'architecture can no longer be exclusively static. They are developing a synthetic architecture which literally comes into action. In trans-ports the meaning of time and space performs a dramatically stretched elasticity. An architecture which communicates in real time with other architecture elsewhere, where distance is no longer an issue. The interactive pavilion trans-ports lives both in physical reality as on the world wide web, and establishes streaming communication between the bits and the flesh.'
If the experiment succeeds, the possibilities of a truly different architecture, an architecture that is inter-active, that is truly fluid has become within reach. At the same time both worlds, the real and the virtual, will integrate, thus erasing the artificial barrier between them in a discipline (architecture) that seems to resist this integration most successfully.
We will see.
The event can be attended in Alpha World (coordinates 950s2000e ). The pavilion can be visited in VRML in both 'dance mode', 'info mode' and 'art mode'. Links to the necessary plug-ins, and more info can be found at: www.trans-ports.com