One of the most stunning exhibitions in London this year was LightHive, a dramatic 3D installation of LED's from TridonicAtco that fill the Front Members' Room of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. This vast constellation of lights is linked to sensors distributed throughout all 160 rooms of the School of Architecture, monitoring the building's overall activity throughout the course of the day. This culminates in the installation's own luminous timelapse playback from its database log of the three week exhibition showing cumulative activity.LightHive maps the precise spatial location and type of every significant infrastructural light source in the school, and compresses that model into its main exhibition space. TridonicAtco has supplied 1,027 superbright Power LED EOS 2 LED's for each data-point, their colour temperature referencing that of their original light source. The shape of each diffuser emerges from the light falloff pattern of its original light type, distorting to the precise geometry of each original room; its tapering arms are shaped by type but rotated to indicate the direction in which local light travels, radiating to key transition points of its source space. The school fits neatly into the Front Members' Room at a scale of 1:6 within their respective spaces, whilst LightHive's elaborate infrastructure snakes through 160 rooms, labyrinthine conduits and corridors of the AA's main urban hub. This exhibition has enabled people to literally shine!
