Contemplating the void: Iwamoto Scott
© Iwamoto Scott Architecture
As promised, more projects for the Guggenheim’s Contemplating the Void.
This time we feature Iwamoto Scott‘s proposal.
LIGHTCONE uses fiber-optic lines to turn the void into a light channel with different purposes:
© Iwamoto Scott Architecture
Like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim itself, LightCone forms a choreography of light, art and movement through space.
Informed by Wright’s spiral-conical geometries, LightCone combines three different arrays of suspended fiber-optic lines: 1) The central conical array transmits and transforms the light of the sky from the large overhead skylight. 2) The surrounding spiral array pulls in the changing light of the city outside from the spiraling skylights that follow the ramp. At night these two arrays switch over to artificial light powered by batteries, solar-charged from transparent photovoltaic film applied to the skylight glass. 3) The peripheral array’s mediated light projects images from the NY Guggenheim’s collection. Fed from a digital database, these images can be arranged in a variety of ways: by default they are organized chronologically along the building’s five ramped galleries into five decades. Within each structural bay between the supporting piers, the viewer can use an interactive device to reorganize a sampling of the collection by artist, by genre, by size, by color, etc.
© Iwamoto Scott Architecture
LightCone ultimately attempts to further Wright’s interests in exploring the plasticity of structure, the continuity of space, and “bringing the circle into the third and fourth dimension”, while integrating five decades of content from the Guggenheim’s collection into the building’s spatial experience.
- Iwamoto Scott Architecture
© Iwamoto Scott Architecture
© Iwamoto Scott Architecture
© Iwamoto Scott Architecture
© Iwamoto Scott Architecture
© Iwamoto Scott Architecture
© Iwamoto Scott Architecture
Credits:
LIGHTCONE Design and Visualization:
IwamotoScott Architecture, San Francisco, CA
Principals: Craig Scott , Lisa Iwamoto
Project Team: Stephanie Lin, Blake Altshuler, Ryan Golenberg, Magda Melo
Is it just me or do the renderings for all of these ‘Contemplating the Void’ projects seem the same? And impossibly light?
What do you do with the voided space?
You accentuate it with netting.
these void projects are all so strange coming from such amazing firms. MAD? are they going to remove all the glass of the atrium? what about water getting in? this one too…isnt the skylight already a ‘light channel? fiber optics are only effective at night, museums are closed at night. they all just seem strange and irrational.
I think these proposals are on to something. a common vision for supreme lightness. Unlike MAD, I find this more interesting as it uses the galleries internal geometries to generate the form. A proposal that attempts to register not accentuate the space.
rupertKensi: clearly the idea would be to darken the skylight except that small area feeding the fiber optics, thus enhancing their glowing effect.