Urban interaction: these ingenious electronic screens provide new forms of interactive thrills for Tokyo's jaded urbanites - Design Review - Mitsubishi Shoji - Tokyo, Japan

Architectural Review, The, April, 2003 by Michael Webb

Mitsubishi is developing a few prestigious blocks at the heart of Tokyo, hoping to turn the broad boulevard that leads from the railway station to the Outer Palace Garden into a japanese version of the Champs-Elysees. Bloomberg, a global, multi-media news and information company, which rents three floors in the Shin Marunouchi Building, commissioned Klein Dytham Architecture to create a ground-floor electronic display that faces out through glass to the street and inwards to the lobby. Called the Interactive Communication Experience (ICE), it dramatizes the company's interest in creativity and communication. There was a big crowd of visitors on opening day, and it continues to provide an entertaining and informative public spectacle.

Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham opened their Tokyo office in 1990, winning attention for temporary and short-lived projects that occupied middle ground between architecture and environmental art, and have since graduated to larger commissions. The architects brought in Toshio Iwai, an artist specializing in interface design, to help them develop ICE, which they describe as 'an icicle -- a pure white element that allows clouds of information to condense'. Two arcs of museum-quality glass, five metres wide and three and a half high, are suspended, back-to-back, from the ceiling above the backlit grid of the translucent glass floor. The 80 000-pixel, three-colour LED display is linked to three computers, which generate two tickers of stok quotations that broaden and fan up, or narrow and dive down on the screens to colourfully dramatize shifts in price.

When you've checked your investments, it's time to play. Infrared sensors behind the glass detect your presence and a menu scrolls down the screen. You touch one of four icons to play a digital harp, set shadows racing across the screen, link lines with another player to create a giant cat's cradle, or play volleyball. What makes this display so compelling is its size and sophistication, attracting the suits as well as the jeans crowd. Businessmen line up with little kids to play on the touch-sensitive screens. Even a technophobe like me found it irresistible, and an attendant was happy to demonstrate the pattern-making to a visitor in a wheelchair. At one end of the room are five high-tech armchairs you can set to knead your back or give a shiatsu massage while you watch Bloomberg Television (a cable channel) on swivelling monitors. Truly urban entertainment.