The medial skin of urban architecture.The following prophecy was uttered by Willie Williams, a US-American video and stage designer: ‘The cityscapes of the future will be determined not by architects, but by video artists." His vision is already reality in London, where a ‘Global Multimedia Interface‘ in Leicester Square has been attracting attention since late 1999. An LED screen spanning the entire 4th floor of a building can be seen by some 4 million people a month. Foreseen is the screening of anything from one-minute animated films to three-hour film master pieces, along with the parallel streaming on the Internet. This entails low publication costs, and looks like art. A more successful design concept is that of the video facade of the VEAG building in Berlin, where selected video works produced specially for the facade shine out in the battle against daylight and street lights.
Is the urban fabric increasingly becoming a gallery, a cinema? Is innovative technology taking hold of new, public realms with a detectable cultural gain for the urban community, or are these moving facade images applications that under the guise of being modern and arty merely cause excessive costs and disrupt the smooth flow of the traffic?
The concepts devised for most interactive multimedia facades to date have tended to relate either to the changing local weather situation or activities inside the edifices behind them. This is true, for instance, of the weather-influenced ‘Zeit’ by Christian Möllerin Frankfurt-on-Main, which is one of the earliest interactive facades, or the installation realized by Joachim Blank and Jeron in Leipzig as recently as autumn 1999 in a small- scale version that visualizes the streams of data flowing through the Internet. However not just student concepts like 'Parkspace' by Birte Steffan, or ‘airforcestuctures‘ by Kerstin Lohmann und Thomas Lüdecke fail to be realized. Mature projects like ‘Netzhaut' for the Ars Electrónica Center and the facade planned for Deutsche Telekom at the Expo in Hanover (either project is by Möller and Sauter) were foiled by municipal regulations, cost considerations,or the temerity of the clients. In other cases, trivial designs or incompatibility with the existing architecture have hindered realization. Standards are still waiting to be set.