[Editors] MIT Unveils Building Made of Water

[Patti Richards]

MIT News Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Contact: Patti Richards
t. 617.253.8923; email: prichards at mit.edu

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MIT researchers design "digital water pavilion"
Building to be unveiled in Zaragoza next year
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PHOTOS AVAILABLE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 12, 2007

Imagine a building made of water. It features liquid curtains for  
walls - curtains that not only can be programmed to display images or  
messages but can also sense an approaching object and automatically  
part to let it through.

MIT architects and engineers have designed such a building, and it  
will be unveiled at next year's international exhibition in Spain.  
The "digital water pavilion" - an interactive structure made of  
digitally controlled water curtains - will be located at the entrance  
to Expo Zaragoza 2008, in front of a new bridge designed by Zaha  
Hadid. The structure will contain an exhibition area, a cafe and  
various public spaces.

"To understand the concept of digital water, imagine something like  
an inkjet printer on a large scale, which controls droplets of  
falling water," explains Carlo Ratti, head of MIT's SENSEable City  
Laboratory.

The "water walls" that make up the structure consist of a row of  
closely spaced solenoid valves along a pipe suspended in the air. The  
valves can be opened and closed, at high frequency, via computer  
control. This produces a curtain of falling water with gaps at  
specified locations - a pattern of pixels created from air and water  
instead of illuminated points on a screen. The entire surface becomes  
a one-bit-deep digital display that continuously scrolls downward.

All of the walls of the pavilion will be made of digital water, as  
will vertical partitions, both on the edge of the roof and inside it.  
The pavilion roof, covered by a thin layer of water, will be  
supported by large pistons and can move up and down. When there is  
too much wind, the roof will lower. Similarly, when the pavilion is  
closed, the whole roof will collapse to the ground and the whole  
structure will disappear.

"Water, actuated by gravity, has traditionally been the most dynamic  
element in architectural and urban space," said William J. Mitchell,  
head of MIT's Design Laboratory and former Dean of Architecture at  
MIT. "For centuries, architects have shaped and directed it by means  
of channels and pipes, nozzles, and valves. The industrial era  
brought powerful pumps, which enabled larger-scale water elements,  
such as jets that spurted high into the air.

"Now, in the digital electronic era, new combinations of sensor  
technology, embedded intelligence, networking, computer-controlled  
pumps and valves, and control software open up the exciting  
possibility of urban-scale, precisely controlled, highly interactive  
water."

The facade of the water pavilion will be like a very large display,  
with text, letters, and interactive patterns. "You could throw a ball  
at the wall, and then see an open circle drop down to meet it  
precisely where and when its trajectory intersected the water  
surface. And, with suitable programming, touching the water surface  
at any point can propagate patterns horizontally, along the wall, to  
other locations," Mitchell explains.

Equipped with suitable sensors, Water Walls can detect the approach  
of people and, "like the Red Sea for Moses, open up to allow passage  
through at any point," said Mitchell. "This provocatively subverts  
the fundamental architectural conception of an opening as something,  
like a door, found at a fixed location."

The Pavilion illustrates the potential of "digital water" as an  
emerging medium. While there have been prior attempts to digitally  
control water droplets, this is the first time that the idea was used  
to create an architectural space. Since plumbing and electronics are  
not inherently expensive and recycled water is plentiful and cheap,  
water walls could conceivably be created on a large scale.

"The dream of digital architecture has always been to create  
buildings that are responsive and reconfigurable," said Ratti. "Think  
about spaces that can expand or shrink based on necessity and use. It  
is not easy to achieve such effects when dealing with concrete,  
bricks and mortar. But this becomes possible with digital water,  
which can appear and disappear."

Ratti added: "In the Nineties, digital technology led us to fantasize  
about distant virtual worlds. Today we have moved on: the future of  
architecture might deal with digitally augmented environments, where  
bits and atoms seamlessly merge."

The digital water wall concept was initially developed in the  
Zaragoza Digital Mile class at MIT, led by William Mitchell and  
Dennis Frenchman, with Michael Joroff and Carlo Ratti. The design of  
the Digital Water Pavilion was carried out by the architecture office  
'carlorattiassociati - Walter Nicolino and Carlo Ratti with Claudio  
Bonicco' (Turin, Italy); the engineering company Arup (London, UK and  
Madrid, Spain); and landscape architects Agence Ter (Paris, France).

More information and full credits can be found at http:// 
www.digitalwaterpavilion.com/


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