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Cracking the QR Code: Reading a Building with your iPhone. |
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[January 11, 2010] - A new building in Tokyo lets you read the thoughts of its inhabitants from its facade. |
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To Robert Venturi, structure is like a skeleton. Architecture isn't complete until it's fleshed out. To Mies, structure is architecture. It's reality reduced to its spiritual essence. Perhaps, however, the greatest power of architecture is to reconcile the irreconcilable, and it's hard to think of a better expression of this than Tokyo's N Building, a collaboration between Teradadesign Architects and Qosmo Inc. The building, itself, is fairly unremarkable. What's extraordinary is the facade. The For N Building, Qosmos CEO Nao Tokui sought out an alternative: Being a commercial building, signs or billboards are typically attached to its facade, which we feel undermines the structures identity. As a solution we thought to use a QR Code (two-dimensional bar code) as the facade itself. QR (Quick Response) Codes, were created in 1994 by Denso, a Japanese manufacturer of auto components, originally to track parts during the manufacturing process. QR Code is a matrix type of bar code. We're all familiar with traditional one dimensional bar codes, which express information in a linear strip of bars of varying width. QR Codes take this into the second dimension. A linear bar code may accommodate 128 characters; a 2D QR Code, as many as 7,089.
Here's an ad from DoCoMo Japan demonstrating on how QR Codes work (and how they'll let you land and keep your man.) While QR Codes have been slow to catch on in the U.S., that appears to be changing. In San Francisco in 2008, more than 500 restaurants signed up for a QR Code test. That same year, Ralph Lauren included QR codes in its ads for the US Open. According to a recent article by Christina Warren on the Mashable Social Media Guide, Google has sent out 190,000 QR stickers to local retailers, which they can place on windows or around their stores where patrons can scan them with their cell phones for ready access to the retailer's Places page on Google. As could be expected, Microsoft has created its own proprietary version of QR Codes the Microsoft Tag. QR code reader apps are available for the iPhone, the Android, and through service providers such as Sprint. The actual design of QR Codes has gone far beyond the functional, with firms such as Set Japan embedding codes in the type of artwork you see here, for clients as upscale as Louis Vuitton, seen at the right in set of images above. QR Code has been become an inspiration for everything from street art to surfboards. In architecture, QR Codes can be applied symbolically, as in Vienna's Söhne & Partner's design for a Code Unique Hotel for Dubai's Studio City. Prophetically - and ironically - the firm has described Dubai as "the next Mecca of the global illusions industry." The use of QR code appears to poetic - and fixed: The facade gives the hotel the name, it is not only an eyecatcher - the implication of the facade structure is a code - a special matrix code to be named - QR Code . . . There is a massage behind the code - but who knows it? Take your mobile and decode it!Teradadesign and Qosmo's N Building is more dynamic, using a dedicated iPhone app to "read" the building:
As explained by Qosmo designer Alexander Reeder, who also creates interactive garments and perfume,
Despite what the commercial photographers might tell you, architecture is seldom complete without the people a building was designed to serve. Through their actions and alterations, through their very presence, people modify a structure's design. Louis Kahn once famously created a dialogue in which a brick was asked what it wanted to be. And while it's likely that commercial options will soon crowd out all others (one can imagine how QR codes might be deployed, say, in Amsterdam's Red Light District), Teradadesign and Qosmo poses - and proposes to answer - an intriguing, Kahn-like query of inhabitated structure as it evolves through time and use: what is this building thinking? Join a discussion on this story.
© 2010 Lynn Becker All rights reserved.
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