Invisible Landscapes
2 February - 1 April 2019
The Architecture Studio, The Dorfman Senate Rooms
Monday 10am – 7pm
Tuesday to Thursday 10am – 9pm
Friday 10am – 10pm
Saturday 10am – 7pm
Sunday 10am – 6pm
Free
Explore how virtual-reality technologies will transform how we design, look at, and interact with the world around us.
Since the 1970s, when the first virtual-reality technologies started being used for medical, military, industry and entertainment purposes, architects have speculated about the possibilities that working with these technologies could bring to architecture. Today, virtual, augmented and mixed reality are blurring the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, and questioning what is real and what is fictional.
Invisible Landscapes: Imagination (Act III) presents projects by four practices – Gilles Retsin Architecture, ScanLAB Projects, Keiichi Matsuda and Soft Bodies. From immersive installations to film and virtual-reality experiences, the third act of Invisible Landscapes explores how the virtual might transform the physical space and vice versa. All question how we might interact with and look at the world around us, both now and in the near future.
Monday 10am – 7pm
Tuesday to Thursday 10am – 9pm
Friday 10am – 10pm
Saturday 10am – 7pm
Sunday 10am – 6pm
Free
Invisible Landscapes (Act III) by Gilles Retsin, ScanLAB, Keichii Matsuda and Soft Bodies
Installation view, Real Virtuality, 2019
Illustration of VR experience, Weightless Bricks, 2019
Post-Lenticular Landscapes: Equirectangular 05 Nevada Falls (after Muybridge and Adams), 2018
Merger, 2018
Weightless Bricks: virtual-reality experience:
Weightless Bricks is a site-specific mixed reality experience created by Soft Bodies. Experienced through a virtual-reality headset, viewers will adopt the first-person perspective of a worker, led through a series of virtual spaces and blended with some of the physical objects presented in the display. The viewers will explore a hybrid scenario where physical architecture has become fully entangled with a digital world.
Meet the participants
Gilles Retsin
Gilles Retsin is a London-based architect and designer whose work explores new architectural models that engage with the potential of increased computational power and fabrication to generate buildings and objects with a previously unseen structure, detail and materiality. His work is part of the Centre Pompidou collection, and has been exhibited at the Museum of Art and Design in New York and the Vitra Design Museum. He is Programme Director of the B.Pro Architectural Design (AD) at the Bartlett School in London.
Meet the participants
ScanLAB Projects
ScanLAB Projects is a creative practice, half art studio half research laboratory, led by artists / designers / technologists Matthew Shaw and William Trossell. It specialises in exploring the use of large-scale 3D scanning for architecture and the creative industries and has become one of the UK’s pioneering agencies in the field. Its projects digitise the world, transforming temporary moments and spaces into compelling permanent experiences, images and film. Amongst their clients are The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC and the New Museum.
Meet the participants
Keiichi Matsuda
Keiichi Matsuda is a future-facing designer and film-maker. His short films speculate about mixed-reality environments acting as cautionary tales for the future of humanity. Matsuda’s award-winning work includes provocative short films, such as Hyper-Reality (2016) and Augmented (Hyper) Reality: Domestic (2010). His work has been exhibited internationally including the V&A, Art Institute of Chicago and MoMA. In 2018, Next Reality named Matsuda as a top AR influencer while he was serving as Leap Motion’s Vice President of Design.
Meet the participants
Soft Bodies
Soft Bodies is an interdisciplinary design studio, based between London and Amsterdam and founded by Paula Strunden, John Cruwys and David Flook, who met while studying at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. The studio seeks to freely expand the production of space and objects by bringing the physical and virtual worlds closer together.
Cathedrals: a film by Rick Farin
Explore Cathedrals, a film by Rick Farin featuring new music by Gaika on NOWNESS in response to Invisible Landscapes. The film explores how technology is changing our environments and how we navigate them. Enter the two-dimensional version of this virtual world where "computer and nature are synthesised together on a cellular level" and stay tuned for the opportunity to experience this virtual reality world in the Architecture Studio.
Invisible Landscapes: Environment (Act II)
Invisible Landscapes: Environment (Act II) was the second instalment of Invisible Landscapes, a three-part project in the Architecture Studio examining how digital technologies are transforming our lives and everyday environments. The second act explored how technological advances can force us to reconsider what it means to be human and thus shape the everyday landscapes around us.
London-based strategic design studio Dark Matter Laboratories created an installation that examined the shifting paradigm of design that technology is making possible. From designing objects to designing outcomes, from designing products to designing performance. This project presented a proposal to reclaim the social value of architecture in order to create a more equitable urban environment for all.
Invisible Landscapes: Environment (Act II) ran between 6 October 2018 – 20 January 2019.
Invisible Landscapes: Environment (Act II) by Dark Matter Laboratories
About Dark Matter Laboratories
Hosted at architecture & strategy practice 00, Dark Matter Labs works across the world. Their cutting edge research, strategic design and organisational innovation projects aim to tackle the wicked challenges of the 21st century and enable more resilient cities, rural regions, supply chains and investment practices. Amongst their clients and partners are UNDP, McConnell Foundation, West Midlands Combined Authority, Bloxhub, Waag Society, Dubai Airport Free Zone Authority, Dubai Expo 2020 and YMCA.
Invisible Landscapes: Home (Act I)
Invisible Landscapes: Home (Act I) was the first instalment of Invisible Landscapes, a three-part project in the Architecture Studio examining how digital technologies are transforming our lives and everyday environments. The first act explored the impact of smart technologies, sharing economy platforms and apps on domestic spaces and queries how these may be altering the meaning of home. Barcelona-based architecture practice MAIO explored in this installation how these digital technologies respond to changing economic and social conditions, redefining contemporary domesticity and questioning how architects will operate in this context. They present the home as not simply an isolated space but part of a wider system where the boundaries between public and private, urban and domestic spheres are blurred.
Invisible Landscapes: Home (Act I) ran between 19 May – 24 September 2018.
Invisible Landscapes: Home (Act I) by MAIO
About MAIO
MAIO is an architecture practice based in Barcelona whose work examines spatial systems that allow theoretical and practical positions to converge. The award-winning practice has developed a wide range of projects and scales: from furniture or exhibition design to housing blocks and urban planning. MAIO was founded in 2012 by Maria Charneco, Alfredo Lérida, Guillermo López, and Anna Puigjaner. The latter was recipient of the Harvard University’s Wheelwright Prize in 2016 for her proposal Kitchenless City. The project studies exemplars of collective housing in Brazil, Sweden, Russia, Korea, and elsewhere, which reflect a variety of approaches to organising and distributing domestic spaces.
About the Architecture Studio
The new Architecture Studio provides a permanent home for architectural explorations. It’s a creative space that invites audiences to engage with innovative and critical ideas on architecture, visual arts and contemporary culture.
The Architecture Studio programme presents projects and installations that foster research, discussion and production around architecture, culture and society. We invite some of the most innovative thinkers and practitioners from across architecture, design and art to participate. Together they create installations that showcase and test emerging material that suggest ways in which architecture can address and question contemporary issues, whether environmental, cultural, social or political.
Supporters
Virtual reality partner
In collaboration with
Media partner
