Chameleon skin: wrapping a dumb concrete and glass office block in stainless steel mesh is intended to turn it into a shining landmark - Kramm and Strigl's Expomedia Light-Cube, Saarbrucken, Germany - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, June, 2002 by Layla Dawson

Digital service companies are seen as the panacea for stagnating economies. Beside the Saar river in Saarbrucken, an inner-city multimedia business centre has replaced former labour-intensive coal and steel industries. Kramm & Strigl's Expomedia Light-Cube is its public relations centrepiece. Designed as a physical manifestation of the virtual world, it is in fact a conventional six-storey office block wrapped in a spectacular light show.

The paradox of this project is that a static building is given the appearance of an ethereal vision. Enveloping a standard concrete envelope is a 1500 sq m outer skin of fine stainless steel mesh. At night this acts as a membrane for the projection of images: during the day, as a transparent veil revealing light effects from within the building. Sandwiched between the concrete building shell and mesh mantle is a grid of LED glass rods. These transport computer-generated, continually metamorphosing, rainbow-coloured fractal images on to the outer face. (An effect familiar to those who remember psychedelic light shows produced with low-tech slide projectors.) This camouflage of illumination is augmented by a small LED display screen set into one elevation which projects more recognizable entertainment and news images.

In daylight the 4.5 mm thick steel mesh is a silver mirror reflecting climatic conditions. (Whether this will be a hazard to air transport in bright sunlight is as yet unknown.) The mesh construction is tensioned and made rigid with spacer bars to withstand storms and it also allows individual technical components between the two skins to be removed and replaced. Similar customized systems were devised for Hanover's Bertelsmann Expo pavilion and Berlin's Sony Centre.

Architects Kramm & Strigl recognize that a media revolution is not necessarily an architectural one. Their building is a landmark structure attempting to mediate between old and new architectural technologies and theories, but the philosophies of Derrida, Baudrillard et al, do not conveniently translate into earthbound buildings. Essentially, this is a pleasing high-tech blanket thrown over a functional container. Internally, a light-filled atrium is enclosed on three sides by office floors for deskbound employees. Architecture, be it a caravan or a castle, can house virtual worlds but remains firmly rooted in the real one. Even computer workstations need shelter from the rain.