The Aegis Hyposurface is a dECOi project, the inspiration of and led by Mark Goulthorpe and the dECOi office along with a large multi-disciplinary team of architects, engineers, mathematicians and computer programmers, among others. I collaborated with Mark in the competition entry and the development of the project to the point where a working prototype 10 metres wide and 3 metres high was a star attraction at the March 2001 Cebit trade fair. I was working at Deakin University at the time, and we drew heavily on the expertise of other departments at teh University, principally Professor Saeid Navahandi and Dr Abbas Kouzani – creative mechatronics geniuses. Please see below for a full list of the members of the project team.
This project was developed for a competition for an interactive art-work outside the foyer of The Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre situated on a protruding section of wall 5m above the pavement below: a projecting billboard. ‘Aegis’ is a faceted metallic surface that has potential to deform physically as a real time response to electronic stimuli from the environment (movement, sound, light,etc). Driven by a bed of 896 pneumatic pistons, the dynamic ‘terrains’ are generated as real-time calculations.
‘Aegis’ marks the transition from autoplastic (determinate) to alloplastic (interactive, indeterminate) space, a new species of reciprocal architecture (refer to this link by Mark Goulthorpe).
A section of Aegis was later on show at the ‘Non Standard Architectures‘ exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris: December 10 2003 – March 1 2004.
See also this link.
SIAL also contributed to three of the projects on show at the Pompidou: Aegis, Paramorph II, and Blue Gallery, and produced the exhibition multimedia. I was one of the four essayists in the accompanying catalogue (summary).
MARK BURRY 