A Case Study of Mediated Urban Architecture: Red Pavillion 2010

Today the city has become the dominant ’scenery’ for everyday life as such it present still greater design challenges for an improved urban spatial performance. To design for more inspiring and stimulating public spaces one must begin by acknowledging that urban spaces are sites of movement and interaction that holds unutilized potentials. Public spaces of the city are ’stages’ for interaction and by exploring how such ’stages’ are used in terms of human movement and occupancy we get an idea of what the sites are used for, as well as how they may be enriched by adding program, redirecting flows or proposing new interaction affordances. It is a design challenge to develop new tools and methods for analysis and design that utilizes new computational techniques as an integrated part of the mediated architectural concept - from the parametric sketch to CNC fabrication and into the illumination of the face expression of the building. We search for more informed, inspiring and appealing environments that challenge the role of the use of media in public spaces, and facilitate a new reconfigurable design trajectory that holds new social and spatial qualities in a highly mediated interactive urban environment. Inspired by the observation techniques of Erving Goffman this paper will present observations on human behaviors in different experimental participatory setups around the Red Pavilion, located on the windy edge of the Limfjord in Aalborg, Denmark 2010. By placing two shell structures towards west and southeast, the pavilion became a shelter for the wind and established a more private space opening up towards the fiord and the sunset. Five seatings and a stage is furnishing the interior of the pavilion, while projectors, computers, loudspeakers and interior lightings represented the building’s media toolbox.- a toolbox which facilitated the change of colour for every pixel on the screen. In night time the building took different “face” expressions in relation to genre of music, time of day or activity level around the pavilion.