A feel for the future
Prestigious industry-prize win for two Bartlett School of Architecture students hints at new collaborations possible in architecture.
An innovative project that aims to capture human sentiment through the medium of light offers an exciting insight into where architecture goes next. ‘Sentiment Cocoon’, which won the No8 @Arup Prize, is the work of The Bartlett School of Architecture PhD candidate Moritz Behrens and MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation student Konstantinos Mavromichalis.
Sentiment Cocoon aims to represent a collective visualisation of the way people are feeling in the immediate environment of the installation. Ultimately, the aim is to foster the notion of public spaces as the social centres of our cities.
Installed onsite at Arup’s offices, the design combines computation and architecture. Simple interfaces allow participants to express how they feel in the public domain by how they touch. These interactions are then transformed into pulses of light that travel throughout the Cocoon.
The Cocoon was operated 24/7 for 13 weeks inside Arup’s No.8 offices. About 1,880 smart card interactions on six dashboards were logged in total. Participants actively engaged mainly on the way to their desks in the morning, during lunch time or in the late afternoon. Others simply enjoyed watching the colourful and dynamic visualisations.
Greg Chandler, Arup Project Manager, says the project highlights what can happen when all disciplines collaborate: “When you listen to each other and take on board other people’s thinking and ways of working, the end result is often amazing. The fact we have been able to construct [the design] in the middle of a fully functioning office has already engaged people within No.8.”
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