Topophilia - by Stardust Architects
360° video contribution for Topophilia Pavilion The project for this pavilion won a national competition for Romania’s representation at the congress of the International Union of Architects in Seoul. The theme of the congress was the soul of the city. The Order of Romanian Architects added a subtheme—a suggestion to also talk about the independent initiatives, the new projects that change the urban world.
The pavilion proposes an immersive experience in a place in Bucharest, a re-naturalised site with a very peculiar recent history. Inspired by the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Han depicted by Italo Calvino, the place unveils itself in the exhibition context through atmospheric video recordings, sounds, smells, objects and plants. In the 3x3 space provided by the exhibition hall, two cubes were built‑up. The interior one serves as a a translucent environment for the panoramic video mapping, but also as a series of windows towards the space in between the two cubes, where a series of objects are exposed: living plants, old and newer objects from the site, sound recordings. The architecture can be seen as an abstract grid but also may suggest some sort of glazed porches so typical of Balkanic architecture.
Our contribution to the project was to capture high resolution 360° panoramic video from Văcărești Natural Park to be used in the video mapping on the four vertical sides of the pavilion. In order to do this we built a custom 4 go-pro camera rig, leaving the nadir and zenith out. The captured footage was stitched into one panoramic video and then segmented to cubic projection. The four vertical sides rendered separately at high resolution, were incorporated into the pavilion’s video mapping.
*this project represented the Romanian Order of Architects at the International Union of Architects’ conference in Seoul 2017. After Seoul, the pavilion lives on: it has already been exhibited twice in the National Museum for Contemporary Art in Bucharest and at Casa Mincu in Bucharest.
