British designer Asif Kahn has unveiled his design for an interactive installation that will greet visitors at this year’s winter Olympic Games, which take place in the Russian city of Sochi this month (February 2014).
The ‘pavilion’, which will be placed at the entrance of the Sochi Olympic Park, will take the form of a 2,000 m2 cube with a ‘kinetic façade’ created by Khan in close collaboration with Basel-based engineers iart. The façade [how does it work] can transform in three dimensions to recreate the faces of visitors to the building, allowing them to create their own ‘selfless’.
British designer Asif Kahn has unveiled his design for an interactive installation that will greet visitors at this year’s winter Olympic Games, which take place in the Russian city of Sochi this month (February 2014).
The ‘pavilion’, which will be placed at the entrance of the Sochi Olympic Park, will take the form of a 2,000 m2 cube with a ‘kinetic façade’ created by Khan in close collaboration with Basel-based engineers iart. The façade [how does it work] can transform in three dimensions to recreate the faces of visitors to the building, allowing them to create their own ‘selfless’.
Formed by 11,000 actuators, the resultant portraits will appear on the side of the building, three at a time, at 8 metres tall. This feature of the building has been likened to a digital, architectural Mount Rushmore. The faces to emerge from the side of the pavilion will be magnified at a scale of 3,500 times the original.
Kahn said: ‘For thousands of years people have used portraiture to record their history on the landscape, buildings and through public art. I’m inspired by the way the world is changing around us and how architecture can respond to it. “Selfies”,”emoticons”, “Facebook” and “FaceTime” have become universal shorthand for communicating in the digital age. My instinct was to try and harness that immediacy in the form of sculpture; to turn the everyday moment into something epic. I’ve been thinking of this as a kind of digital platform to express emotion, at the scale of architecture.’
Russian telecoms company MegaFon, a major sponsor of the Games, commissioned the project.
Asif Khan got his break when he was chosen to take part in the Design Museum’s Designers in Residence programme in 2012 [link]. Describing himself as an art director and user experience designer’, he has gone on to design interactive installations for Coca-cola and Swarovski.