Carole Clark

Sarah Sze: 360 (Portable Planetarium) 

The artistic mediums of painting, sculpture, and architecture collide in the intricate installations of New York based artist Sarah Sze. Her impressive works of architectural scale often feature the use of household items such as lightbulbs, oscillating fans, teabags, toilet paper, jeans, string, rocks, paper, and house plants, forming the everyday into a fantastical testament to contemporary issues concerning interconnectivity and ecological sustainability. In the process, these household objects are re-appropriated and their value re-evaluated. 

360 (Portable Planetarium) is a complex and labour-intensive work that leaves viewers breathless, inviting them inside an architectural haven of scattered possibilities. Having experienced the work in person at the National Gallery here in Ottawa, I was immediately drawn to its fractal nature. While the items Sze uses vary in function, I felt as though each part of the installation was directly related to another, creating a multi-faceted dialogue. 

Portable Planetarium transforms the everyday into a source of wonder. With a collection of accumulated items it configures a new, confined, world of possibilities and illustrates new ways in which we can continuously use items that appear to have little significance. 

Wendy: Dance and neutralize pollutants all in one space

Meet Wendy, a dynamic partyscape in Queens, NY that was designed with an environmental conscience. It provides an edgy, spacious, fun space to party in — all the while cleaning the air.

Architects Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner (HWKN), winners of this year’s MoMA Young Architects Program (a competition to build an outdoor partyscape for its PS1 location in Queen’s) were encouraged to work within guidelines that addressed issues of sustainability and recycling. As Hollwich said, “Architecture is entering a new period where buildings have personality, rights, and responsibility. Wendy is testing these grounds on a social, ecological, and humanisitic level.”

Their design consists of a ginormous scaffolding to support 1555 square yards of fabric coated in a solution of titania nanoparticles, which neutralizes airborne toxins. In this way, HWKN designed a rooftop partyscape that contributes some part in cleaning the air. As described by Hauke Jungjohann, director at Wendy’s structural engineering consultant firm, “Wendy is the perfect synergy of architectural aesthetics, systems efficiency and structural creativity. The magic of Wendy lies in the usage of something simple like a scaffolding system and reinventing its usage so that something new appears that has never been seen before.”

If you need any more proof that this is an awesome design, it is expected that Wendy’s impact on air pollution during the summer of 2012 will be equivalent to taking 260 cars off the road. And those spiky arms in the design? They shoot out blasts of cool air, music and water. With temperatures reaching the mid-thirties in Ottawa within the last few days, Wendy sounds like the awesomest summer party space ever.

To help fund the construction of this ambitious and complicated structure, HWKN worked with graphic designers to design merchandise (bags & T-shirts), all of which are also coated with the same pollution-neutralizing solution used on the structure itself.

Philips Bio-Light: Bacteria as Energy Source

Philips’ newest Microbial Home concept is a resourceful and visually dynamic bio-light that uses bioluminescent bacteria, fed with methane and composted material (poop and waste) as an energy source. As you can see, this light is not only an achievement technologically and scientifically, but it is pretty impressive aesthetically as well.

For Philips, however, this is more than a light — it is a life-changing idea: “Potentially biological products could be self-energizing, adaptive, responsive, self-repairing, act as biological sensors to environmental conditions, and change the way we communicate information.”

So there’s waste, and then light, but how does it work? In scientific terms, bioluminescent organisms produce luciferase, an enzyme, which interacts with a molecule called a luciferin, which emits light. This type of light is produced at low temperatures (unlike incandescence, where light is produced as a result of high heat).

Luminescent light is consequently less intense, described as “more suitable for … ambience and indication than functional illumination”. It is slower than conventional light sources, and its functionality depends on the living material’s life itself. What’s cool about that, though, is that the light emitted is susceptible to change, and likely to react to its environmental setting. Essentially, it’s an ambiance-creating light source with a life of its own. 

Philips sees a more practical future for this concept in night-time road markings, warning strips on flights of stairs, informational markings on cultural institutions, and the like. As well, they see potential in its ability to create new genres of atmospheric interior lighting, that could potentially have therapeutic effects. All of this said, there are no plans to sell this light as a Philips product. Instead, it is intended to spark discussion: “this concept is testing a possible future — not prescribing one.” Oh well… we can dream!