Semper hilaris.

Ever since the idea became fashionable of the rain-screen as a building's outer skin, architects and designers have been doing some very interesting things with the idea--including rereading the slightly dotty theories about building surfaces and textiles by Gottie Semper. But there have been some fascinating real life cases--quite apart from the recent animated skin of the Cook-Fournier Kunsthaus at Graz (AR March 2004). For example, there is the Blinkenlights lot (at www.blinkenlights.de) who were active for a couple of years after we mentioned them in late 2002 and from whose site you can still download a slightly out of date suite of programs which enable you to turn buildings into monster monochrome computer screens. It's nothing to do with projection and it involves setting up lots of computer controllable lights inside a building's windows. And then playing Pong or sending incredibly public love notes via your mobile phone. People at MIT were doing similar stuff around the same time. And there was, of course, that earlier millennium countdown on Canary Wharf tower by the independent London artist, Peter Fink.