The centre attraction of the Steinhart Aquarium is the Water Planet, a 6,000 sq ft exhibition area. Designed in collaboration with New York exhibition design firm Thinc Design, the exhibit incorporates new modes of design and technology.
The Water Planet firmly establishes new visual, conceptual and creative benchmarks for aquarium design. It offers visitors opportunities to touch water in its many states - as mist, steam, flowing and frozen - and the exhibition's forms and surfaces embody the tactility and sensuality of water. The exhibition integrates living animals and powerful multimedia in order to bring complex natural phenomena within the grasp of young visitors and families.
The walls and exhibition islands of the Water Planet reflect the sensuality of water via the heightened forms that we were able to create. The complex curving and moulded surfaces seemingly flow from one to another. The forms invite touch, which in turn will trigger media windows to open on many of the surfaces and create flows of water and steam across them. A seamless media field with 10 interlinked projections transforms the exhibit space each hour into a full-round theatre, delivering a powerful and entertaining educational programme.
Urban A&O is one of a handful of design firms that operate within the sophisticated computer design environment of parametric modeling, employing the powerful tools of CATIA-based software. Urban A&O's innovative work has tested limits of material and form through the development of new spatial geometries with strong conceptual underpinnings that link directly to the Water Planet's needs. Working with the agency of parametric modeling tools, the firm's capability to bring radical new forms into practice provided the all-important link between conceptualization and realization.
0 comments:
Post a Comment