Description:
"A visionary architectural pioneer creates a responsive landscape to infuse one of downtown's busiest spaces with astonishing new life.
A worldwide pioneer in the fast-growing field of responsive architecture, Beesley and his team of collaborators pose the question “could architecture come alive?” In reply he creates spaces that dissolve into forest-like hovering fields, kin to primitive life-forms within dense jungles and ocean reefs. These responsive environments offer bodily immersion and wide-flung perception. In this new installation, Beesley combines visionary design with high-tech digital engineering to turn an everyday public space into a world of wonder.
Sargasso refers to the vast, tangled floating masses of living matter and cast-off material that drifts at the centre of the Atlantic. The environment within the sweeping atrium of the Allen Lambert Galleria makes a vast canopy, a sanctuary that slowly shifts and floats above the city. The building is no longer an entity of steel, glass, and stone but a participant in a symbiotic artistic event that shapes the nature of the environment itself.
Commissioned by Luminato."
Attendance held steady at this year’s Nuit Blanche, and the all-night arts festival pumped tens of millions into the local economy, according to figures released by the city Tuesday.
A little under a million people came to the event, which saw 130 art installations set up across central Toronto on Oct. 2 and 3, the same as last year. Slightly more of those attendees came from out of town – 140,000, compared to 100,000 in 2009.
While the festival itself is free, the sheer number of people on the streets and out-of-town tourists were estimated to have generated $34.7-million in revenue for businesses, up from $18-million last year.
The city also announced the winners of this year’s Nuit Blanche Peoples’ Choice Awards. They included Aurora, a series of chain-mounted lights suspended in the atrium of the old Royal Conservatory of Music building, that lit up based on peoples’ movement; XXIX, where scores of speakers played 29 singers singing in different languages in the lobby of the Royal Ontario Museum; and Flux and Fire, a platform near Lamport Stadium that, using motion detectors, would spew forth three-metre-long columns of flame.
Curators are also accepting submissions for next year’s installment, the festival’s sixth. The deadline for submitting ideas for city-produced projects in Dec. 15, while those hoping to create independently-funded works have until Feb. 15.
beautiful pics!