AEGIS HYPOSURFACE©
Birmingham, UK, 1999-2001





The Aegis Hyposurface is a dECOi project, designed principally by Mark Goulthorpe and the dECOi office with a large multi-disciplinary team of architects, engineers, mathematicians and computer programmers, among others. This team included a Professor Mark Burry, who was working at Deakin University at the time, along with various others from Deakin, including Professor Saeid Navahandi and Dr Abbas Kouzani. Please see below for a full list of the members of the project team.

This project was developed for a competition for an interactive art-work for the foyer of The Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre. The piece is a facetted metallic surface that has potential to deform physically in response to electronic stimuli from the environment (movement, sound, light,etc). Driven by a bed of 896 pneumatic pistons, the dynamic 'terrains' are generated as real-time calculations.

The piece marks the transition from autoplastic (determinate) to alloplastic (interactive, indeterminate) space, a new species of reciprocal architecture.


CURRENT STATUS

Aegis will be on show at the 'Non Standard Architectures' exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris: December 10 2003 - March 1 2004.

SIAL have contributed to three of the projects on show: Aegis, Paramorph II, and Blue Gallery, and have produced the exhibition multimedia. Mark Burry is one of the four essayists in the accompanying catalogue (summary).


FULL PROJECT TEAM

» Client: The Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre

» Concept: Mark Goulthorpe of dECOi Architects

» Design Team: Mark Goulthorpe, Prof. Mark Burry, Oliver Dering, Arnaud Descombes

» Design/Implementation: Prof. Mark Burry, The School of Architecture & Building, Deakin University, Australia with Grant Dunlop

» Mathematics and Programming: Dr Alex Scott, University College London; Peter Wood, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ; Xavier Robitaille, University of Montreal, Canada

» System Engineering/Design: Prof. Saeid Navahandi, Dr Abbas Kouzani, Intelligent Systems Research Group, The School of Engineering & Technology, Deakin University, Australia

» Mathematics: Dr Alex Scott, Prof. Keith Ball, University University College London

» Engineering: David Glover of Group IV, Ove Arup & Partners, London, UK

» Facade Consultant: Sean Billings of Billings Design Associates, Ireland

» Rubber Research: RAPRA, UK, Burton Rubber, UK

» Adhesive Research: Loctite Ltd, UK

» Pneumatic Systems/Fabrication: Univer Ltd, Bradford, UK

» Facet Manufacture: Spanwall Ltd, Ireland

» Sponsorship: National Endownment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), UK, The Arts Council, UK

» Art Consultant: Vivien Lovell of Modus Operandi, formerly the Public Art Commissions Agency (PACA)