LightHive

Pushing CCTV into the third dimension, multi-talented architect, teacher, filmmaker, actor, and occasional Kultureflash writer Alex Haw’s LightHive exhibition at the Architectural Association is a rhizomatic system of devices detecting the movements of bodies throughout the school’s five addresses and 160 rooms. 1,027 meticulously mounted LEDs turn the Front Members’ Room into a three-dimensional map of the institution’s activity, a “luminous architectural surveillance” network celebrating the perpetual pinning up of new drawings, new forms, new ideas in Britain’s oldest and most vital school of architecture. Haw, who runs the “experimental collaborative practice” Atmos and has worked in a range of famous offices including those of Diller & Scofidio, Richard Rogers, and Nicholas Grimshaw, describes the project as an architecture that is “millimetres thick and kilometers long”. The patterns of movement are logged and played back into the exhibition space at magnifications of six (the number six being the underlying unit of the project), with the grande finale beginning at 7pm on Friday 25 May, when the lights will play back all that they have seen during the course of the show. Witnessing that, you will see yourself transmuted into light – and architecture.

MagnusLarsson

LightHive