Notes

A new stimulating game of belief
Integrating natural elements into computer-aided design, Orproject?s latest and award winner of the A-Design Gold for 2018 is really a sculptural art installation that explores the medium of light as a material. Architecture and design practice, Orproject with offices in London, Beijing and New Delhi has always been on the threshold of exploring cutting-edge advanced geometries to result in a high-end aesthetic having an ecologic agenda.
Their most recent private commission for a 200-plus-year-old home garden in Dusseldorf, Germany, is really a sculptural tree ? a modern intervention that mimics its natural counterparts ? perhaps initiating many a dialogue on life and its evolving philosophies. Using the analogy of the procedure of photosynthesis in plants, where plants grow towards the foundation of light and the veins in their leaves supply every cell with nutrients ? an activity that results in overall growth of the plants; the architects develop a tree-trunk-like installation with a stainless-steel surface, set onto which are side-glowing fiber-optic cables that appear like the veins of Ivy on a tree.
Expressing their architectural method of ecological design with a visual narrative, playing on slight of eye in a stimulating game of perceptions, the look is developed using computational algorithms. It employs a 3mm thick layer of CNC-bent and CNC-cut stainless that wraps around bent rings, giving it its angular form. Discreetly threading fine cables through miniscule apertures on the surface, fibre-optic cables are tied to the tree-like sculptural form.
Precision underlines the geometry in addition to the execution. The result: a self-supporting, hollow, metal, colour-changing tree weighing approx. 800kg that glows at night! Christening it Photoptosis ? stylized from photosynthesis and fibre-optics ? the making of the art involved first applying the algorithm to the stainless-steel structure and then replicating it with the incorporation of fibre-optic cables.
?In order to have the intricate branching appear mostly on leading of the tree, its growth was calculated in a non-Euclidean, warped space,? informs the firm?s Delhi Partner, Rajat Sodhi, who spent three weeks to install it on site. Throughout Traffic Tour , the lighting system is almost invisible, and the stainless-steel tree forms a prominent focal point. However, when dawn sets in, the glowing veins slowly start to emerge, before tree fully disappears in to the darkness of night and only the vein structure stands otherworldly in the garden.
My Website: https://www.gamegab.com/play/16612/Traffic-Tour/