• 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.