Guto Requena: The Latest Architecture and News

Walk into a room bathed in cozy, inviting light and you’ll feel instantly at ease. Walk into the same room buzzing with harsh fluorescents, and your teeth may start to grind.

Why?

In 2014, a Journal of Consumer Psychology study found that the more intense the lighting, the more affected and intense the participants’ emotions were — both positive and negative.

The study included six experiments that examined the link between emotion and ambient brightness. Feelings of warmth increased when participants were exposed to bright light with hints of reddish hues. A sensation of angst increased when bluer light dominated.

And the brighter the light, the more intense the participants’ emotions became. Both the intensity and the color of the light affected people’s moods. 

What is enough light? The question is difficult enough but when faced with having to calculate how much LED lighting you need to create a well-lit space, it can become a bit more complicated.

Whether it’s architectural LED lighting for commercial applications or residential applications, here’s how to determine how many LED Lumens you’ll need to properly light your space.

For some practitioners of architecture, the insatiable desire to draw everything, from the largest to the smallest to take full control of the project, echoes the famous phrase uttered by Mies Van Der Rohe: "God is in the details." Similarly, designing furniture provides another creative outlet for in-depth exploration of human-scale works of architecture.

Throughout the history of the Brazilian Architecture, and especially since the modernist movement, architects not only became known for their building designs, but also for their detailed chairs and tables. Several of these pieces of furniture were initially designed for a specific project and then went into mass production due to their popularity. 

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From the 4-6 of November, the Mediterranean Real Estate Fair, URBE 2016, featured an installation by São Paulo architect and urban planner Guto Requena. The public artwork, entitled “Can you tell me a secret?” is a collection of temporary street furniture: a phone booth that records visitors’ stories and plays them back randomly into five wooden benches.

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Part street furniture, part data visualization, Guto Requena’s “I am” installation in São Paulo invited passers-by to interact with the city and connect with one another. Observers were asked to sit on a bench and take a picture of themselves, while also selecting which of six emotions they were feeling at the time: love, joy, surprise, anger, fear or sadness.

Each emotion was associated with a color through which the photo was filtered before appearing on the main façade of the FIESP Building along Paulista Avenue. The images then faded into a graph to colorfully display the predominant emotions at the moment. 

Videos

Estudio Guto Requena has designed a new façade, which also doubles as an urban art intervention, for the Hotel WZ Jardins in São Paulo. Dubbed “The Light Creature,” the 30-story facade is visible both during the day and at night, changing to interact with its surroundings and responding to stimuli like air quality and sound. During the day the façade has a pixilated blue, gray and gold skin that serves as “a visual reflection of the soundscape of São Paulo’s iconic Avenida Rebouças,” and at night it is illuminated by interactive light patterns.

Learn more about The Light Creature after the break.

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From November 19-22 in Aarhus, the Media Architecture Biennale 2014 held in will feature the world premier of "Mapping the Senseable City," an exhibition of the now ten-year-old MIT Senseable Cities Lab's collected works. The following essay was written by Matthew Claudel, a researcher at the Senseable Cities Lab, In response to this collection, exploring what the future holds for media architecture, and imploring it to explore ideas beyond "TV screens for living in."

The Actuated Cathedral

Media architecture is emphatically ambiguous. The phrase has been pasted wholesale onto a dizzying array of projects and products. But beyond imprecision, media architecture is vexed by an inherent tension: media are networked, immediate, dynamic communication systems that reach people broadly, while architecture is sited, singular, and persistent in time. Reconciling the two evokes clumsy associations with Times Square, screens, integrated LEDs, paparazzi, or more generally things that flicker.

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London-based United Visual Artists (UVA) has brought Sou Fujimoto’s “cloud-like” Serpentine Pavilion to life with an “electrical storm” of LEDs. With the intention of making the architecture “breathe” from within, UVA seamlessly integrated a network of LED lights into the latticed, 20mm steel pole structure that mimics the natural forms of an electric storm. In addition, carefully conducted auditory effects further enhance the experience, transforming Fujimoto’s “radical pavilion” into an electrified geometric cloud.