The NEW Green Wall

The ubiquitous green wall – and let’s face it, they’ve been popping up everywhere lately, from the Qantas Lounge at Sydney’s International Airport to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris – is usually a lush vertical garden bed, a vertiginous undergrowth of damp moss and dripping ferns. Not this green wall. GreenPix is Beijing’s first zero energy ‘media wall’: a building-sized movie screen that collects energy while the sun shines, using it to display digital media art by night. More razzle-dazzle than rainforest.

Designed by Simone Giostra & Partners Architects and Arup, the giant video screen measures in at 2,200m2 – just a tad larger than your average flatscreen – covering the entire glass curtain façade of the Xicui Entertainment Complex, near the architectural wonders of the 2008 Beijing Olympics precinct. One of the largest LED displays in the world, following in the footsteps of Jim Campbell’s installations and realities:united’s Kunsthaus in Graz, it is also Beijing’s first venue dedicated to digital media art, and China’s first photovoltaic system integrated into a glass curtain wall.

With the support of leading German photovoltaics manufacturers Schueco and SunWays, Giostra and Arup developed a new technology for laminating polycrystalline photovoltaic cells within the glass of the curtain wall. The glass solar cells – the first produced by Chinese manufacturer Suntech – are positioned in a varying density pattern across the glass skin, in such a way as to reduce heat gain and admit natural solar access to the interior when required, while saving the excess solar radiation until after dark, when it is used to power the media wall. Giostra also displaced some of the glass solar panels, prising them off the sheer façade at an angle of five degrees, so that even during the day, when the ‘media’ aspect lies dormant, the whole curtain, though static, appears to ripple and flicker like the surface of a sunlit ocean. It is only as the sun sets, and the nightlife of Beijing comes out to play, that the entire building comes alight, using the solar energy harvested during the day to illuminate moving images on the colossal video ‘screen’.

With just 2292 of these LED ‘pixels’ (a standard computer screen would have about 500 times that), the GreenPix display is dramatically low resolution for something so high tech. But this is no technological oversight, rather, an intentional subversion of commercial billboards and their flashy, in-your-face hi-tech, hi-res advertisements. Paying homage not to the gaudy riches of capitalism or the technology behind its physical form, but to 19th century pointillism, Gerhard Richter’s seascapes, and the wealth of modern video art in China’s booming youth culture scene. “On one end is very sophisticated technology,” Giostra says, “and on the other end is the poetic factor, which is as important as the science”. Confined to displaying detailed abstraction at best, it is a medium totally unsuited to commercial communication, and must therefore remain true to its artistic intentions. The largescale pixellation, while strikingly vague close up, becomes more defined with distance, sensitive to the fact that for the most part, its audience are busy Beijingers, zipping past along the major arterial road onto which it faces.

The screen functions in three distinct display modes, controlled by embedded, customdesigned software. In the first six weeks since its June 24 inauguration, GreenPix ran in ‘mode 1’, showing preprogrammed clips created by two groups of video artists. The first was a series of video files by Aaajiao (Xu Wenkai) and Shih Chieh Huang, guest-curated by Defne Ayas, a Shanghaibased new media and performance curator for PERFORMA Biennial; the second, coordinated by GreenPix Production, included site-specific displays from Russian Beijing-based artist Varvara Shavrova, Canadian video artist and software developer Jeremy Rotsztain and New York-based emerging artists Elim Cheng and Taylor Levy. As the program develops, GreenPix will host a compelling series of videos, installations and performances organised by a diverse team of local and international curators, art institutions, galleries, media schools, corporations, collectors and benefactors, under the coordination of curator Luisa Gui.

Mode 2 is ‘simple interactivity mode’, wherein an infrared camera translates human movements into an abstract visual, facilitating a dynamic dialogue in the public realm, and an unprecedented level of interactivity between people and the architecture that surrounds them.

In the final mode, the pressure-sensitive glass skin reacts to minute fluctuations in wind, and the display on each panel changes slightly, creating a truly dynamic, intelligent moving image. Any other so-called ‘environmentally responsive architecture’ pales by comparison. This is it: a fluid dialogue between the built form and its urban environs.

Giostra & Partners has a particularly active presence in China at present: the firm is responsible for the design and implementation of some of the country’s most creative developments, including the Jinbao Entertainment Centre in Beijing, and the Jingya Grand Hotel in Weihai. Giostra also has already amassed an impressive portfolio of curtain walls throughout Europe and the US, each, like GreenPix, owing their dramatic lighting to Arup, which itself has over 30 years experience – and a quarter of its staff – in China. But this is the first time Giostra and Arup have worked together to integrate lighting into the façade: this is no projection screen, it is a fullyfunctioning monitor. And if you can’t see the difference, then just remember the difference between those huge, dim projection screens, and the latest top-of-the-line LCD widescreen.

By mimicking and utilising the earth’s natural rhythms in this manner, the media wall responds to the aggressive and unregulated economic development that has run rampant in the Chinese architecture industry, often at the expense of the environment. This development owes everything to the environment – from its technological, structural and artistic attributes, to its nomination for Energy Building of the Year at the 2008 World Architecture Festival. It is a highly visible message – literally and symbolically, both within the Beijing metropolis and internationally – that Chinese architecture is undergoing a serious ecochange. It is a breath of fresh air on a smoggy, neon, Beijing night. +

1 Covering the entire façade of the Xicui Entertainment Complex, GreenPix is China’s first zero-energy media wall, using photovoltaic cells in the glass curtain (seen here as black squares) to power the ‘screen’ by night. 2 The dedicated video display venue is a first for China, and brings the Xicui Entertainment Complex on par with its neighbours: the architectural behemoths of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. 3 Unlike simple projection displays – where light shines onto the building from externally positioned spotlights – GreenPix is lit from within, just like a giant LED monitor. 4 Some of the glass pixels are flexed out from the sheer building face at a 5-degree angle, which, when viewed from a distance, makes the screen look like the surface of a shimmering ocean. 5 When not displaying video art projects, GreenPix depicts patterns that correspond with slight pressure variations across the surface of the screen. 6 The screen faces onto a busy arterial road: the perfect audience for its abstract yet unmissable large-scale displays. 7 The solar cells are dispersed in varying density across the façade, according to the need for solar protection of/access to the spaces within. 8 The solar cells are part of the glass skin that floats off the structural face of the Entertainment Complex building. 9 This is the first project in China to sandwich photovoltaic cells and programmable multicoloured LED video ‘pixels’ within a glass curtain façade.


IMAGES courtesy and copyright of Simone Giostra & Partners, Arup, Zhou Ruogu Architecture Photography