A responsive skin to the windows of a building that filters daylight into a moving projection of shadows, that translates the ever-changing natural timeline of the outdoor to the static and perpetual indoor space.

Shade is a new material that applies as a glass window surface. Through variably blocking or passing light, it forms sunlight into a spacial, graphic projected moving image of shadows. It's surface holds a grid of triangular cells that are each individually able to change their level of opacity, and hence block or pass light. The graphic shadows projected on the floor, walls and ceiling of the space - varying from sharp and graphic, to environing and spacial depending on the time of day - reveal the geometrical patterns of wind that pass the building on the other side of the glass, as choreographed by the measurements of an outdoor sensor.

As both the angle of the sun and the patterns of wind are continuously changing throughout the day and year, the perpetual character of the artificial space is reconnected with an evolving, unplanned natural timeline.

2011

Commissioned by and part of the permanent collection of The Art Institute of Chicago

Nominated for the Design of the Year Award 2012 of the Design Museum London

London, UK - Design Museum 2012
Chicago, US - The Art Institute of Chicago 2011