Facade with Many Faces

In the Olympic Park at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi: Visitors queue up to be photographed in 3D photo booths. A short time later, their faces are emblazoned on a facade as tall as a house. The portrait becomes a monument, and the visitors momentarily become part of the Olympic architecture. It’s a huge spectacle, and thanks to the enthusiasm of the people portrayed, it spontaneously spreads around the world via photos they take with their phones.

The 3D photo booths capture the facial data of the visitors and send it to the kinetic facade. 11,000 individually controllable and extendable actuators form giant three-dimensional faces, dramatically accented by translucent spheres with RGB LEDs.

iart developed a complete interdisciplinary solution that ranged from the design and construction of a prototype to the integration of software and hardware to planning and implementation. The result: The world’s first large-scale kinetic facade, which helped our client, MegaFon, gain worldwide attention.

With MegaFaces, iart has proved that in the age of total media saturation, even the shape of buildings can also be changeable. New possibilities for communication between architecture and people create sensory encounters.