Interactive intrigue

Architecture’s spring Charrette gives online lives a physical presence 

The 52-foot-long Sound Worm would gather audio from all over the Rice campus. The design won the Rice School of Architecture's spring Charrette.

How does one find common ground between modern-day analog and digital lives?

That was the central conceit in the Rice School of Architecture (RSA) spring Charrette, in which students were asked to come up with a physical installation to represent what such an intersection might look like.

Six teams of students, each of which had to incorporate at least one member from another discipline at Rice, came up with innovative answers that were judged at the RSA Jan. 27.

A charrette is a competition in which teams are challenged to conceptualize and complete a design in a limited amount of time. The design portion of the event organized by RSA undergraduates Sophie Eichner and Austin Jarvis, with help from Rice’s EtherNest, began at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 17, and ended at noon the following Monday. Each team gave a public presentation of its project in the RSA’s Farish Gallery a week later; the judging panel comprised faculty from the RSA and the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts, as well as fabricators and designers from outside the school.

The "Sound Worm!" team presents its concept to the jury at the Rice School of Architecture's spring Charrette.

The six-member winning team decided audio would best serve the purpose. The creators of “Sound Worm!” designed a movable, reconfigurable tube that could be set up anywhere and deliver live sound from various feeds around campus.

It would be a form of eavesdropping, but with fair warning. Microphones in a dozen lecture halls and public spaces across campus would be clearly marked for intent, the students said, and the sounds they gathered would be transmitted to speakers at various points along the 52-foot tubular sculpture.

“In this contemporary society, when everyone’s on their phones all the time looking at their screens, you feel like you’re more connected to everyone, but in fact you do separate yourself from everyone,” said team member Juan Borbon, a junior mechanical engineering major. “This project does the opposite.”

Members of the "Sound Worm!" team, winners of the Rice School of Architecture spring Charrette, include, from left, Nathan Keibler, Juan Borbon, Adelina Koleva and George Hewitt. Missing from the photo are Lydia Smith and Juncheng Yang.

The students found the idea of providing visitors a random slice of life at Rice that changes as one walks through the installation irresistible.

“Rice has a lot of different social facets, and we wanted to have them come together to produce a connection between them that you can feel,” said RSA senior Adelina Koleva. “The lack of visual cues would provoke you to be curious and want to visit those places.”

“We wanted to avoid doing anything too visual,” added sophomore George Hewitt. “We wanted to avoid doing an iPhone app or something you could download because we wanted to involve the whole campus, whether or not they knew.”

The team also included anthropology and visual arts senior Lydia Smith and architecture seniors Juncheng Yang and Nathan Keibler.

The second-place design, “Social Circle,” is a walk-in structure of vertical shutters that open and close in response to floor-mounted buttons. The shutters open to reveal who’s on the other side when the buttons are pushed both inside and outside of the circle, and also open and close at speeds related to cellular activity in the vicinity.

Other ideas to give the immaterial Internet a material presence involved a field of giant umbrellas that would open, close and change color depending on the emotions of those addressing them through the Net; a modified Polaroid camera that would spit out Instagram photos by participants; semitransparent public screens that tie virtual identities to real ones; and a public display that continuously maps mobile communications across campus.