One of my favorite trends in contemporary urban architecture, a simple pleasure really, is the lining of buildings with enormous mirrored windows that reflect the city and sky around them. This melds the buildings to their surroundings, and draws attention to the physical space between them.
Artist Ned Kahn takes this visual trick to another level. He has created a number of architectural facades and monuments that consist entirely of small mirrored or semi-mirrored squares, each hanging from low friction joints. Each of these small squares dangles independently, responding only to the wind. When viewed from a distance, they outline the shapes of the wind gusts ripping across the sides of the buildings (the photo is of the facade for the Technorama science center in Switzerland, taken by Christopher Stumm). Not only do these squares reflect the surroundings, the sky, and the sunlight, but they show the actual shape of the air around the buildings. The video below shows the Technorama facade in motion, and I also highly recommend this video of Kahn's Articulated Cloud facade at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum.
The wind, which you can usually only feel and hear, is visualized in Kahn's facades. Kahn and others have described his work as "digitizing" the wind and the air, but I feel that this trendy allusion misses the point. First of all, the squares have a range of motion, not just "up" or "down", meaning they are not purely digitized into 0's and 1's. They can look dark or light, or many grays in between. Secondly, there is no intrinsic reason to "digitize" the wind around a building. To do so would introduce postmodern concepts of cultural juxtaposition that are completely unnecessary here.
"Quantization" is a much better way to describe what these pieces are showing. The small squares each represent a "quantized" unit of space, each moving independently of each other. When acted upon by the wind, they form the shapes of moving waves, each square being excited individually. This provides a wonderful metaphor for the structure of air itself, which is made up of tiny "quantized" molecules that bump around, giving rise to the gusts of wind we can feel and hear. It is also a stunning analogy for modern physics, especially in the realm of quantum field theory, where forces are described as both fields and quantized particles at the same time. That is what Kahn's facades are: a bunch of individual squares, and a pattern of propagating waves and ripples, existing simultaneously.
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