Seeing Machine

Seeing Machine:
Brunel Gateway 

Architecture is an instrument constructed through qualities of experience and modes of perception radically restructuring our everyday.

Through an invitation from world-renowned performance artist Stelarc, Minimaforms was asked to develop a gateway structure for Brunel University. The pavilion structure is one of a family of architectural interventions that are proposed as part of a university campus works project. The brief was to develop a system that would correlate these interventions and identify critical sites as a means to restructure the public space of a university that has expanded rapidly in recent years beyond its original campus design. 

Brunel Gateway is a seeing machine, structured as an open-cell network that operates through a series of operable convex and concave lenses, amplifying and collapsing the experiential relationships between users and their context. Developed through a parametrically controlled cellular deployment system, these lenses are distributed with both optical and structural parameters at play. The underbellies of these lenses extend as part of a three-dimensional fibre field in which structural fibres and optic hairs are set out. The access plane hovering over the water surface of the reflection pool is constructed as a series of walkable lily pads that enable users to experience a complete sensorial displacement as one moves through this architecture of interface.