• Pro-active Space: The building morphology augments itself in real time to suggest and provoke the possibilities of engaging with a space.

• Balancing Structure: Dynamically resisting external forces, making a skyscraper stand perfectly upright when enduring strong winds.

 

THE MUSCLE TOWER 2 The second Muscle Tower prototype was an interactive advertising billboard structure with built-in behaviors for reacting to its environment, through bending and rotation of its elements. The tower consists of a network of aluminum rods, connected flexibly to each other and to pneumatic muscles by means of hollow iron spherical nodes (see Figure 4). Each spherical node attaches to one end of a fluidic muscle and two aluminum rods that create 3D framed sections (of variable dimensions), which are stacked upon each other to build up the entire tower.

This positioning of the muscles allows the 3D frame to be bent, twisted, and deformed while maintaining a sense of balance of the entire tower, thus preventing it from toppling over. A cumulative stacking and attaching of subsequent frames allows for a higher degree of movement. The tower is programmed using Virtools, which obtains data about the presence of people by means of a sensing field with motion sensors laid out in the periphery of the tower (see the sidebar). The tower can elegantly bend, twist, and turn toward the sensed spatial coordinates of people around it in order to attract attention to an advertisement displayed on the tower’s surface.

 

Figure 6. A Bamboostic forest.