Embrace the atomic age in White City
By Tom Howells
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Few buildings evoke post-war London architecture like Arthur Hayes and Graham Dawbarn’s Television Centre: a midcentury icon especially recognisable for the totemic ‘atomic dots’ motif across its main façacde. The 14-acre site was sold to Stanhope, Mitsui Fudosan and AIMCo in 2013– and is now a fertile hub of office space, homes, recording studios and restaurants – but the dots remain.
For LDF24, they’ve been harnessed as inspiration for ‘Atomic Connection’, a two-pronged lightwork/furniture installation by Amsterdam-based tech innovators Synthetic State and Belgian designer Mathilde Wittock, set to engage visitors to the White City icon in unprecedentedly vivid new ways.
SS’s work – dubbed Dialogue – is a multi-part light installation and tech demo, wherein circular rays (in thrall to the dots) are used to flood parts of the TVC building with a panoply of brilliant hues. The central atrium, with its internal bridges, is “the beating heart of the whole system”, explains founder Navin Abey, though there are interventions strung around the site. The experience is both passive and active – with a real-time interactive element with the use of sensors altering the projection with the movement of an observer, changing the sense of a space.
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“We see lighting as a way that our living technology can communicate with other people,” explains Abey. “TVC is a miniature city, where there's a lot of activity happening. We see it as a really great way to kind of bring everyone together and activate this space.”
Wittock’s half of the concept, meanwhile – called Bounce – comprises two equally eye-popping benches and a lounge chair, constructed from colourful, recycled half-tennis balls (that circle motif again) and placed in the central atrium; a serene zone to stop, recline, and enjoy the enveloping show above, in a part of the TVC building often missed by passing footfall.
“[I’m] looking forward to seeing the building transformed,” concludes Wittock of the pairing, “into a sensory experience where lights, colours, sound, and the flow of life can be contemplated while sitting on the Bounce furniture.”
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