D-Tower, NOX
Doetinchem, the Netherlands, 1998–2004
Right The bulbous, vegetal form of D-tower’s prefabricated epoxy structure. Every evening it is transformed by coloured light. Depending on the results of a questionnaire completed by locals on D-tower’s website about their feelings, it can turn blue for happiness, red for love, green for hate or yellow for fear.
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Conducting your love life or expressing your innermost feelings through an architectural medium, one that seemingly replaces the traditional village green where people met up and shared experiences, is a pretty far-reaching social proposition. But D-tower, a collaboration between architect Lars Spuybroek of NOX in Rotterdam, and QS Serafijn, a Rotterdam-based artist, aims to do just that, writes Lucy Bullivant, in a way that transcends any notion of a pure prosthetic device with an architectural system of communication.
One evening last September, D-tower1 was opened in front of a huge crowd in the city of Doetinchem, in the eastern Netherlands. It is a permanent public art work with its own website. 2 NOX’s tower looks zoomorphic, a little like a pony’s legs. Its website (www.d-toren.nl), which being handwritten has an air of intimacy about it, maps the emotions of Doetinchem’s inhabitants in response to a questionnaire created by artist QS Serafijn, determining the intensity of their feelings of love, hate, happiness and fear. The tower then abstracts the emotions of these answers to the questions through its use of colour, transmitting ‘the State of the Town’ each evening, assuming the colour of the most intensely felt emotion. After running for a month, the architects concluded that it had been often blue (for happiness) or red (for love) and sometimes green (for hate), but NOX’s Lars Spuybroek reports that it has not yet been yellow (for fear). Every six months, a different group of 50 of the city’s inhabitants will complete further editions of the questionnaire. Questions become more and more precise, and the answers are then translated into the form of different ‘landscapes’ shown on the website. Spuybroek explains that in the process, all the ins and outs of their emotional lives are made visible, including ongoing discussions about hot issues. The response to an initial newspaper advert, and
The tall, prefabricated epoxy structure, which Spuybroek likens to a Gothic vault because the columns and surface share the same continuum, provokes attention in its different guises by day and night.
Top and bottom Visualisations of D-tower in Doetinchem, lit up at night, and at twilight just before its lighting is switched on. Notes 1 Project team: NOX (Lars Spuybroek with Pitupong Chaowakul, Chris Seung-woo Yoo and Norbert Palz), QS Serafijn and the V2_Lab (Simon de Bakker and Artem Baguinski). 2 www.noxarch.com.
via the website, for 50 volunteers far exceeded the number of people required, so the first group was selected according to age, sex and neighbourhood, to make it as representative as possible. The tall, prefabricated epoxy structure, which Spuybroek likens to a Gothic vault because the columns and surface share the same continuum, provokes attention in its different guises by day and night. Each evening, the D-tower light comes on simultaneously with the street lighting, and onlookers can also check the colour of the tower on a webcam at www.d-toren.nl/webcam. ‘D-tower is a coherent hybrid of different media, where architecture is part of a larger interactive system of relationships,’ says Spuybroek. ‘It is a project where the intensive (feelings, qualities) and the extensive (space, quantities) start exchanging roles, where human action, colour, money, value, feelings all become networked entities.’ The city’s residents can also place their personal messages concerning the ‘landscapes’ shown on the site in a capsule underneath the tower. Creating a connection between all these elements, D-tower also sends prewritten love letters and flowers from and to designated addresses. At the end of each year it will present a prize of 10,000 euros to the address in the city that, as a result of the website computing, scores the highest level of emotions. 69
Son-O-House, NOX Son en Breugel, the Netherlands, 2000–04
Above The metal beam structure, intended for meetings and general relaxation, at night. Its design is based on choreographed sets of visitors’ movements inscribed on paper bands as cuts, while a sound piece activated by sensors registers these movements. Through van der Heide’s programming, new sound patterns are continually evolved as a ‘memoryscape’.
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Lars Spuybroek of NOX has also recently made a public artwork for Industrieschap Ekkersrijt, in collaboration with composer Edwin van der Heide. Here, Lucy Bullivant describes a project that builds a ‘memoryscape’ of sounds in and near the space visitors participate in making.
Son-O-House,1 ‘a house where sounds live’, is, as NOX’s Lars Spuybroek explains, not a real house but a structure that refers to the bodily movements of visitors, and a sound work continuously generating new sound patterns activated by sensors picking up these movements. Situated on the highway between Son en Breugel and Eindhoven, in the IT and new media zone of an industrial park, it functions as a statement about new technology and social space where people can hold meetings or come to relax and enjoy the ambience.
The metal beam structure itself is based on choreographed sets of human movements inscribed on paper bands as cuts. This formula created ‘an arabesque of complex intertwining lines’, and Spuybroek then married the open structure of lines with the closed surface of the ground to create a three-dimensional porous structure like interlacing vaults that lean on each other, or sometimes cut into each other. To make the 3,300-square-metre structure function as an interactive sound work, 23 sensors positioned at strategic points indirectly influence the music emitted. People can not just hear sound in a musical structure, but also participate in the composition of the sound. ‘It is an instrument, score and studio at the same time,’ says Spuybroek. The system of sounds, composed and programmed by sound artist Edwin van der Heide,2 is based on moiré
effects of interference of closely related frequencies. ‘The visitor does not influence the sound directly, which is so often the case with interactive art,’ continues Spuybroek. ‘One influences the real-time composition itself that generates the sounds. The score is an evolutionary memoryscape that develops with the traced behaviour of the actual bodies in the space.’ The sound work is continuous, with endless variations, none of which are scored but derive from bodily intervention in the space. One visitor commented that he could hear the installation humming on his approach to the house by bike, like the sound of birds in the background. As he entered the space, the sounds changed, and he could feel that it was his presence and movements that were the cause of this. The concept is a potent one, premised on a hybrid, directly body-driven architecture that is a relatively unexplored area, and Spuybroek needs to be given the opportunity to develop these ideas further in other locations. 4
Top and bottom The winding internal space of the structure encourages visitors to linger. NOX has placed sensors here that indirectly influence the sounds it emits by picking up on the sounds visitors make entering or moving around. Sounds alter as a result, and an ongoing compositional loop is created, reflected in the building’s appearance. Note 1 NOX project team: Lars Spuybroek with Chris Seungwoo Yoo, Josef Glas, Ludovica Tramontin, Kris Mun, Geri Stavreva and Nicola Lammers. 2 www.erdh.net.
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