Nearing completion
NOX
Son-O-House
Son en Breugel, The Netherlands
Located in a a large industrial park the Son-O-House is a public pavilion where visitors can sit around, eat their lunch and have meetings, surrounded by IT related companies.
The structure is both an architectural and a sound installation that allows people to not just hear sound in a musical structure, but also to participate in the composition of the sound. It is an instrument, score and studio at the same time.
A sound work, made by composer Edwin van der Heide, is continuously generating new sound patterns activated by sensors picking up actual movements of visitors.
The structure is derived from typical action-landscapes that develop in a house: a fabric of larger scale bodily movements in a corridor or room, together with smaller scale movements around a sink or a drawer.
This carefully choreographed set of movements of bodies, limbs and hands are inscribed on paper bands as cuts (an uncut area corresponds with the bodily movement, a first cut through the middle corresponds with limbs, and finer cuts correspond with movements of the hands and feet).
We staple the pre-informed paper bands together at the point where they have the most connective potential and as a result curvature emerges. The outcome is an arabesque of complex intertwining lines that is both a reading of movements on various bodily scales and a material structure since the paper curves stand upright in cooperation with each other. We only have to sweep these lines sideways to marry the open structure of lines with the closed surface of the ground.
This results again in a three-dimensional porous structure which is very similar to the structure that is obtained by the combing, curling and parting of hair. We digitize this paper analog-computing model and remodel it into the final structure of interlacing vaults which sometimes lean on each other or sometimes cut into each other.
In the house-that-is-not-a-house we position 23 sensors at strategic spots to indirectly influence the music. This system of sounds, composed and programmed by sound artist Edwin van der Heide, is based on moiré effects of interference of closely related frequencies. As a visitor one does not influence the sound directly, which is so often the case with interactive art. One influences the real-time composition itself that generates the sounds. The score is an evolutionary memoryscape that develops with the traced behavior of the actual bodies in the space.
The Son-O-House is one of our typical art projects which allow us to proceed more carefully and slowly (over a period of three to four years) while generating a lot of knowledge that we apply to larger and speedier projects.
NOX: Lars Spuybroek with Chris Seung-woo Yoo, Josef Glas, Ludovica Tramontin, Kris Mun, Geri Stavreva and Nicola Lammers
Public artwork for Industrieschap Ekkersrijt
in collaboration with composer Edwin van der Heide
Son en Breugel, The Netherlands, 2000ö2004
The "D-tower", another project in Holland close to the German border, is also nearing completion.
On March 6 the Maison Folie, part of the program of 'Lille, Cultural Capital of Europe 2004, was opened by M. Martine Aubry, mayor of Lille.
After this year the complex will function as an urban art center where global art flows are mixed with local program. The complex consists of two parts, a renovation of an old textile factory and a newly built 'salle de spectacles' that includes music studios, offices and foyer.
Then there is Lars Spuybroek's book ãMachining Architectureä, a 400 page monograph and ãhow-to bookä where the exact methodology is explained and theorized, that will be published by Thames & Hudson later this year.
There will be contributions by renowned authors like Detlef Mertins, Manuel DeLanda and Andrew Benjamin.
The book will discuss all the issues raised by "non-standard architecture" with contributions by renowned authors like Detlef Mertins, Manuel DeLanda and Andrew Benjamin.
via : http://www.arcspace.com/architects/nox/Son-O-House/index.html
via : http://www.arcspace.com/architects/nox/Son-O-House/index.html