Hasta La Ideas

London architects Pernilla & Asif have unveiled designs for a pavilion that can be played like a musical instrument for the London 2012 Olympic park.

The circular walls of the Coca-Cola Beatbox will be covered in ETFE plastic pillows that are sensitive to both movement and touch.

As visitors come into contact with the building each pillow will emit different sounds prerecorded by British DJ and producer Mark Ronson from a selection of Olympic sports.

A spiralling ramp will lead up behind the panels onto the roof of the pavilion, which will offer a panoramic view across the park.

See all our stories about the London 2012 Olympics here and check out our Designed in Hackney initiative to highlight creative talent in one of the five host boroughs here.

Here’s some more information from the press release:

Pernilla + Asif design the Coca-Cola Beatbox for London 2012

The designers of the Pavilion have been revealed as the critically acclaimed, emerging London practice, Pernilla & Asif, founded by Pernilla Ohrstedt, 30, and Asif Khan, 31. Pernilla and Asif have a history of collaborating on ingenious projects, and are in the process of designing an iconic building that will innovatively combine experimental architecture and cutting edge sound technology to create a stunning visual and sensory experience.

Called ‘The Coca-Cola Beatbox’, Pernilla and Asif’s pioneering building also acts as a musical instrument. It takes inspiration from Coca-Cola’s global platform for London 2012 – Move to the Beat – a campaign which aims to bring teens closer to the Olympics by fusing sport with their enduring passion for music. The creative concept will enable people to ‘play’ the Pavilion through interacting with sounds embedded within the architecture itself. Visitors will be able to create their own beat for London 2012 by remixing sounds of Olympic sports captured for an anthem that is being created for Coca-Cola by Grammy award-winning producer, Mark Ronson.

The appointment of Pernilla and Asif follows the culmination of a formal pitch process, supported by the prestigious London-based Architecture Foundation, which was initiated to discover the next big architectural talent in the UK and give them a showcase at London 2012. The Coca-Cola Beatbox will be the pair’s largest commission to date and has been designed to deliver a lasting legacy.

In line with Coca-Cola’s approach to achieving its most sustainable sponsorship activation to date, the design will also feature environmentally friendly technology.

Maxine Chapman, Director of Showcasing, London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Project Team, The Coca-Cola Company, said: “With the eyes of over four billion people on London next year, we want to use our long-standing association with the Olympic Movement to shine a spotlight on Britain’s brightest stars and inspire young people to pursue their passions.

“Pernilla and Asif impressed us with their creativity, technical skills and vision. I’m delighted that we’re able to give them such a fantastic opportunity to showcase their talents and passions on the world’s stage. I have no doubt that every visitor to the park will be inspired by their innovative and groundbreaking design, both during and beyond London 2012.”

Pernilla Ohrstedt and Asif Khan, said: “As Londoners we are really excited to be a part of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Coca-Cola, a truly iconic brand, has believed in our practice’s creativity and vision to represent them at London 2012, taking our unique architecture to a global audience.

“We have sought out some of the most innovative engineers in the UK to work with us to realise our vision – a ‘building with a beat’. The Coca-Cola Beatbox will be a sensory experience that fuses design, music, sport and architecture. It will be something that people have never seen or heard before!”

The inside of The Hello Cube is beamed to a big screen – a still is also sent back to the Twitter user who initiated the particular combination of colours and patterns

Hellicar & Lewis unveiled their latest digital installation, The Hello Cube, at Tate Modern earlier today as part of a series of events centred around the gallery’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition. Visitors can tweet @thehellocube to dictate the patterns and shapes which appear on a huge screen, and you can even do it (and see your efforts) remotely…

The Hello Cube at Tate Modern on the Turbine Hall bridge

The duo won the pitch to create a piece of work for Tate Collectives‘ Infinite Kasuma weekend in December and the project came out of several workshops conducted with youth teams organised via the REcreative initiative. The Hello Cube, situated on the Turbine Hall bridge from today until Sunday, is the result.

Pete Hellicar and Joel Gethin Lewis formed their practice in 2008 (subscribers can read Eliza’s profile on them from CR July 09, here). Since then they have been working with technology to create interactive art and design projects which, while at the forefront of digital exploration, are often rooted in the physical world. They are now respresented by Nexus Interactive Arts.

The Hello Cube is a direct response to Kusama’s work but it reacts to both social media (Twitter) and physical activity around the cube itself (via microphones). Essentially it is a “Twitterable object”, as Gethin Lewis calls it, containing a screen set within a series of mirrors. Visitors to the Tate, and indeed anyone on Twitter, can tweet ‘commands’ to @thehellocube and the Cube will turn these into short animations.

There are three levels of command terms: firstly, ‘scenes’ such as ‘drawn’, ‘texture’, ‘cells’ and ‘spots’; then ‘effects’ like ‘bigger’, ‘smaller’, ‘flip’, ‘reflect’, ‘ripple’, ‘shake’, ‘pixelate’, or ‘swirl’; followed by sixty different colours in the software. So tweeting “purple texture shatter green pixellate swirls” will result in, well, you’ll have to try it and find out.

A camera situated within the cube films the animation (based on the latest commands given) which is then projected onto a large screen on the Turbine Hall bridge. As you can see in some of the shots below, various holes in the side of the cube allow Tate visitors to stick hands and arms in through the structure, adding to the kaleidoscopic madness (and also messing with the sense of scale).

“When you tweet your commands the camera also takes a snapshot of that space and sends it back to you,” says Hellicar. “We get excited by not being able to predict what will come out of it,” adds Gethin Lewis, “you can essentially interact with the cube from anywhere in the world.”

While clearly a result of their digital know-how, The Hello Cube also comes out Hellicar & Lewis’ interest in “analogue toys and stage craft”, the kinds of elements that have for centuries kept people entranced in front of spectacle.

It’s part of a desire to bring a sense of enchantment into digital projects, with the audience often having equal input in the creation of a piece of work. “We don’t create narratives, we create systems,” says Gethin Lewis. “When people interact with them they create their own narrative.”

Sure, there’s a hefty amount of technology behind The Hello Cube. But strip it back and it seems that, as with much of Kusama’s art on the gallery’s fourth floor, there’s a real love of simple enchantment in their work. “It’s a magical joy machine,” says Gethin Lewis, summing up their Twitter-fed, mirrored-cube-projector very nicely indeed.

To start interacting with The Hello Cube, tweet @thehellocube with a series of the commands listed above. Yayoi Kasuma is on at Tate Modern until June 5. Infinite Kasuma is a partnership with Tate Collectives, REcreative and the Louis Vuitton Arts Project.

One of CR’s attempts sent remotely and helped in some small way by an unidentified gallery-goer’s arms

We’ve had a fantastic response to Dezeen Music Project so far, with loads of great music submitted already. Please keep uploading your tracks to our Soundcloud account.

This track by Ayham Dalal in Jordan should get you nicely in the mood for the weekend. We’ve been bopping our heads to it in the Dezeen office all afternoon.

About Dezeen Music Project | More tracks | Submit your track

BFI Publishing and CR are pleased to announce that Benio Urbanowicz, a third year student from Kingston University, is the winner of our competition to design a cover for a 20th anniversary edition of the BFI Film Classic book on Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now

CR and BFI Publishing invited students to create artwork for the special edition cover which will form part of a set of 12 new covers for the BFI Film Classics series’ 20th anniversary, to be published in August. The winning design (below) was chosen by a panel of judges including Rebecca Barden, BFI Publishing, senior publisher; Sophia Contento, BFI Publishing senior production editor; Patrick Burgoyne, editor, Creative Review; Rob Winter, publisher, Sight &Sound and the original book’s author Mark Sanderson.

Speaking aboout his idea for the cover, Urbanowicz says “I managed to find a beige coat I thought looked similar to the coat from the film in Oxfam, then crafted a hood out of cartridge paper and added it to the coat. Then I stuffed the coat with newspaper to make it look as if someone was wearing it. Suspended on string from the ceiling, I poured red gloss over the jacket and let it drip slowly, whilst adjusting my lighting. Shot against a neutral background, I was able to use Photoshop to extract every red tone in my photograph, which I layered onto a charcoal background.”

This clip documents the process

You can see more of Urbanowicz’s work here and here.

As well as seeing his work in print, Urbanowicz also wins a set of all twelve anniversary editions and an invitation to the series launch events.

There were two joint runners-up. Mina Bach of LCC created this artwork which the judges particulalry liked for its imaginative use of the red coat motif that is such a strong part of the film’s iconography and its reference to another major theme from the film, the waterways in Venice:

While John Walker of the University of Huddersfield referenced a still from the film itself to great effect in his entry

The following entries were highly commedend by the judges:

Dan Jones, Kingston University

Frederick Goodchild, LCC

Hannah Myatt, Kingston University

Hannah Rollings, University of Brighton

Jacek Rudzki, Kingston University

Julie Sheridan, Glasgow School of Art

Madeline Whitty, Kingston University

Poppy Panter-Whitlock, University of the West of England

Rafael Farias, RCA

Richard Buffery, Coventry University

Simeng Zhao, Kingston University

Thanks to everyone who entered. Here are the rest of the covers that will form the 20th anniversary set.

CR in Print

Thanks for visiting the CR website, but if you are not also reading CR in print you’re missing out. Our April issue has a cover by Neville Brody and a fantastic ten-page feature on Fuse, Brody’s publication that did so much to foster typographic experimentation in the 90s and beyond. We also have features on charity advertising and new Pentagram partner Marina Willer. Rick Poynor reviews the Electric Information Age and Adrian Shaughnessy meets the CEO of controversial crowdsourcing site 99designs. All this plus the most beautiful train tickets you ever saw and a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at Thunderbirds in our Monograph supplement

The best way to make sure you receive CR in print every month is to subscribe – you will also save money and receive our award-winning Monograph booklet every month. You can do so here.

Designed in Hackney: next up in our showcase of design talent from Olympic host borough Hackney is Stoke Newington studio Loop.pH, who have installed this umbrella-like canopy of illuminated lace at the entrance to London’s Kensington Palace.

Inspired by the ceremonial lace that has been worn by the British royal family for centuries, the light installation is made from over 4 kilometres of electroluminescent wire and is decorated with Swarovski crystals.

The structure will be on show to the public when the palace reopens next week, following a large restoration programme.

Mathias Gmachl and Rachel Wingfield founded art and design studio Loop.pH in 2003 and have since designed a number of installations using lace-making techniques. We first featured them back in 2007, when they created a glowing structure that reacts to movement, then again in 2009 when the project was featured in an exhibition at the V&A museum. See all our stories about their work here.

Their office is located on Stoke Newington Church Street, just down the road from Dezeen.

Key:

Blue = designers
Red = architects
Yellow = brands

See a larger version of this map

Designed in Hackney is a Dezeen initiative to showcase world-class architecture and design created in the borough, which is one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices. We’ll publish buildings, interiors and objects that have been designed in Hackney each day until the games this summer.

More information and details of how to get involved can be found at www.designedinhackney.com.