Tag Archives: Studio Roosegaarde

This interactive lotus-shaped art installation moves in response to light!

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Art installations like the Lotus Oculus have all the elements that make it a piece you can stare at for hours – it is intriguing, intelligent, and inspiring. This nature-inspired structure uses a smart material that mimics how flowers act when greeted by the sun, thus the dome also is reactive to light! Lotus Oculus was commissioned by Bulgari and was placed in the Modern Art Gallery in Milan.

The story began in 2010 with a little curiosity and a lot of research on smart materials. Studio Roosegaarde’s design team was searching for a material that looked like something that came from nature and also responded to stimuli in real-time. That is how smart flowers were born and over a decade, the studio has done multiple art installations evolving in scope and shape but maintaining the common factor – they all open in response to light and Lotus Oculus is the most recent one.

Lotus Oculus pays homage to the grandeur of the Pantheon and continues the legacy by creating an organic architecture of movement and shadows. This dynamic dialogue is what Daan Roosegaarde calls Techno-Poetry,” the artist explains. When you see the art in motion, it seems to breathe in the air around it. The geometric orb is made of several small panels of smart material and each of which curls into a flower shape when stimulated!

The entire exhibit comes to life as the parts fold and unfold in response to the changing environment and light intensity which presents a show of light and movement throughout the space. The interactive installation is a mix of art and design, it was awarded the A’Design Gold Award and Media Architecture Award Denmark. Some installations are permanent like the Lotus Maffei in the Palazzo Maffei Museum in Verona, Italy and the Lotus Dome in Sainte Marie Madeleine Church in Lille, France.

This striking installation draws you in, observe, move around it and bring the petals to life as you interact with it. Roosegaarde describes this tangible connection between light and material as “a metamorphosis of nature and technology. In search of a new harmony between people and the environment, Lotus is a work of art and a pilot for more organic architecture.”

Designer: Studio Roosegaarde

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Daan Roosegaarde designed an artificial ‘sun’ that can disinfect public spaces with UV light

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The Urban Sun, designed by Studio Roosegaarde along with a team of scientists and virus experts, aims at bringing the rehabilitating power of the sun to public spaces. The artificial sun hovers above open areas, with a UVC lamp underneath it, creating an eclipse-like halo that disinfects everything within its reach. The Urban Sun uses a special 222nm wavelength of Far-UVC that’s powerful at killing the coronavirus but remains completely safe for human exposure.

The video above begins with a simple premise, “Imagine a place where you could meet again”. The Urban Sun hopes to make public spaces safe again. “The goal is not to say that we don’t need the vaccine or we that don’t need masks,” said Roosegaarde. “Urban Sun doesn’t cure coronavirus, but it does allow social gatherings to be safer.” The UV 222 light, specially calibrated and tested by the Dutch National Metrology Institute VSL, can neutralize 99.9% of all viruses in minutes, making social interactions a possibility, and encouraging people to congregate again, safely.

Urban Sun works by being tethered to overhead cables and suspended over a large area. It comes with two broad parts – a powerful lamp that illuminates akin to an artificial sun, and an orb containing the UV 222 lamp underneath that washes spaces with safe, disinfecting UVC light, allowing people to interact while vastly minimizing the risk of spreading viruses like the Coronavirus or even the influenza virus. The Urban Sun was designed in response to how the world changed overnight in the wake of the pandemic. “Suddenly our world is filled with plastic barriers and distance stickers, our family reduced to pixels on a computer screen. Let’s be the architects of our new normal and create better places to meet”, said Daan Roosegaarde, founder of Studio Roosegaarde. A self-funded project, the Urban Sun began in 2019 and eventually blossomed into an interdisciplinary collaboration between designers, scientists, and researchers from the USA, Japan, Italy, and the Netherlands. The studio developed the first prototype to work in Somerset House in London, although Daan envisions the Urban Sun as being installed at open public spaces to make social interaction safe again, and hopes to take Urban Sun to large-scale events such as the Olympic Games or the Burning Man Festival.

Designer: Daan Roosegaarde (Studio Roosegaarde)