Ambient Space, Manhattan, New York

Cantrell focuses on interactive/ reactive landscapes, which explore the ‘device’ or ‘infrastructure’ that responds to environmental phenomena, using the notion of the landscape folly as a deconstructor that highlights environmental processes. A landscape is a complex sensory environment explored and interpreted by humans through multiple inputs.

This project considers the manipulation of the built landscape by introducing landscape devices that create consistent responses to site phenomena and alter spatial conditions accordingly. This is explored through a hypothetical project on Pine Street in Lower Manhattan. The project looks at the street-lighting infrastructure as a reactive network that creates evolving spatial conditions through environmental inputs. The device is a responsive lighting structure that opens, closes, contracts, expands, lowers, raises, brightens, and dims according to inputs such as motion, wind speed, ambient light, and noise. The device is context-aware, creating new spatial configurations throughout the day, slowly readjusting as the environmental inputs change.

Many devices in the landscape use data collection and reactionary systems to perform specific tasks. Streetlights turn on at dusk, traffic lights change based on motion or weight sensors, and doors open automatically when sensors are tripped. These basic binary systems respond to input through a reaction in the device, a one-to-one mapping of environmental stimuli, and device response. By mapping multiple ambient environmental inputs to multiple expressions, the proposed lighting infrastructure develops a complex and ambiguous relationship with the landscape. The proposed street-light system expresses specific site phenomena through the device’s ability to transform itself through simple modifications.

These modifications are expressed in the landscape as morphing spatial configurations. The spatial changes rendered by the lighting network are expressed as pragmatic modifications to the physical space. This project explores the boundary between spatial perception and interactive devices; specifically, the proposed lighting infrastructure aims to express the ambient environment through recognizable and morphing forms.?