atmosstudio

[atmosstudio]

atmos : Headspace from stills to 360

I love the Headspace’s 360 renders and when they came out I was left wondering if using a game engine could have helped us to achieve comparable and faster results.

Unity is the software of choice for many reasons but the most important was that at that time it seemed as if it could handle very complex PRODUCTION geometry without crashing, and in the end this choice paid off. Big thumbs up for Unity!

After sooo many days the first explorable scene (meaning that with mouse and keyboard it is possible to walk inside Headspace as it can be done in many videogames) was done! It was really basic, no materials, no textures, but it was really cool walking in this twilight world of pristine white. There was much room for improvement though and it was really fun discovering some of the possibility offered by Unity.

If by bad luck you missed the last explorable scene here is the link, please keep in mind that the loading times are a bit long. Please refer to this Facebook post to check how to walk around.

As weird as it sounds it was easier to make a game out of the 3d file rather than make a 360 image. To do that I required some help and I tried many additional App (all of those generously available for free at the Unity Store) until I found the best fit.

To capture a fully-fledged walkthrough I just needed to learn how to animate the camera using a bunch of keyframes and that’s it! That’s how the magic (and a lot of fun) happened.

-Lorenzo

[atmosstudio]

A dull parking shed gets transformed into a sensuous flowing landscaped roof that nestles a sunken landscaped court: landcape within a landscape!

-aditya

[atmosstudio]

Our proposal for the Clapham House is about to go in for planning! Cannot wait to dig in and design a wonderful lush landscaped house, with almost every possible surface covered in vegetation!

-Aditya

[atmosstudio]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGAsYTTSZdc)

[atmosstudio]

Dreamscape - published in The Guardian!

We were very proud to be published yesterday in The Guardian :

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/gallery/2016/dec/01/the-worlds-first-permanent-ice-hotel-in-pictures

We made the strapline, which described hoe guests “can climb an ice staircase to a ‘floating’ bed ”, & were one of only 2 projects to feature 2 pictures.

The article described how “the suite also features a staircase of pure ice that winds from its entrance towards the ‘floating’ frozen bed.”

[atmosstudio]

Dreamscape - step-by-step description of the construction process

Many people have asked us how we built #dreamscape, so we thought we’d lay out the steps.

Our construction process involved a series of proposals which we modified once on site and in discussion with the larger hotel design team.

We began by levelling the room and inserting an intricate painted-plywood baseplate the size of the room, which ensured that each subsequent ice block we placed was perfectly positioned, and incremental error could be avoided.

We then sent a series of cutting files to the ice-cutting machine, which created slabs which were then forklifted over and marked with our intricate patterns by the CNC machine.

We used the outer grooves to carve the thick slabs into treads by hand with a 90-degree chainsaw.

We then used the adjustable angle of that chainsaw to carve the chamfers on the vertical blocks which we would place behind each tread, slowly building up a faceted wall of ice-blocks behind the emerging staircase.Both treads and blocks were cut in the giant production hall, but transported by tractor and forklift to the actual refrigerated ICEHOTEL 365 room 400 metres away.

We stacked the treads - a series of large 200mm-thick overlapping sculptural slabs - onto the baseplate, with each one then followed by a 320mm-thick chamfered block behind it, ensuring their top surfaces were entirely flat to receive the next overlapping tread, and ensuring their junction was fully and carefully glued with frozen water.

As we placed each chamfered vertical block, we placed 2 adjacent ice surface edges together and then either cut them with a long curving-toothed Japanese knife blade - or an additional pass of a long chainsaw - to ensure the creation of a slot with parallel edges that enabled the ice blocks to be pushed cleanly together, and the water droplets we slowly dripped down this new gap to work its magic and freeze and mortar. 

This process meant that the 1st tread lay flat on the ground, which the 2nd - and each subsequent one - was only supported along its front edge and sides, with the rear edge hovering like a beam in space.

We added short curling ice blocks to the front tips of each tread (which curled in plan from a straight line perpendicular to your direction of travel up them to lines parallel to your journey - a geometry easiest seen in plan), which we then carved down by hand with a chainsaw to create a continuous sloping line from top to bottom, creating a smooth fillet at the base to slowly morph this shape into the ice trims that connected the journey of these 2 side stringers into the vertical frames either side of the door.

Once the treads were stacked alongside the wall of chamfered blocks, we levelled the top surface and laid a 22m-thick plywood platform to support the bed (we would have also made it ice if the underside if the mattress was ever going to be visually attractive).

On top of this platform we leaned an angled plywood sheet to form a backrest, its edges cut eccentrically to map the junction of this plane (angled in plan) with the corner of the vaulted ceiling above. We then built 2 short vertical plywood walls at either edge of the platform, parallel to the side edges of the bed, and wedged them against the platform with a series of cross-sectional plywood shapes that described a cross section cut-through the bunches of snow tentacles running alongside the bed and exploding out from it, their outline inset to allow for an eventual covering of 50mm of snice either side.In the meantime, we re-measured the actual dimensions of the room compared to our virtual model, and tweaked the final dimensions of our tentacles.

We hand-drew this geometry onto a series of plywood sheets, and hand jigsawed out  the central beam for each tentacle, patching beams together whenever they exceeded the lengths that could fit on a single sheet. 

We then cut 3 plywood sheets into an extensive series of 150-mm wide cross beams, which we screwed into the beams to create cross-sectional stability and prevent warp(you can see these reinforced-snow crosses in the drawing cross-sections)

We then mounted the base of these tentacle beams into slots set within the tentacle cross-section mounted alongside the bed, and fixed their outer tips into their locations in either wall or ceiling.We then started infilling the cross-shaped sections running the length of each beam with snow and snice, which we experimentally mixed with water to achieve the perfect consistency of stickiness and smoothness.

This snice layer was then covered with a more elegant layer of virgin white snow, rubbed and sanded smooth.

We placed the mattress on the platform and filled the gaps between them and the tentacles with infill ice trims which continued the lines that run from the door frame and up the stair stringers - filling any gaps between them and the tentacles with small amounts of new snow.

We then covered both the front of the plywood backrest and the underside of the mattress platform with snice, blending all edges into the snowy surfaces of the room.

Finally, we drew our proposed colonnade of columns onto the 2 massive 320mm-thick ice side walls that supported the entire bed and tentacle construction above, and consulted with the design team before we started cutting into them.

We initially carved out large simple holes with a chainsaw, cutting each chunk into further fragments for portability.

Then we softened the sharp 90-degree edges with the chainsaw before finally setting to work chiselling them into organic shapes by hand carefully honing and polishing before we finally treated the surface with a hot air gun to maximise its luminous transparency. 

- Alex

[atmosstudio]

Dreamscape - new photos of the atmos room by Asaf Kliger

The @icehotel ’s fine in-house photographer, Asaf Kliger, just sent through these 3 photos of our dreamscape project, which can be downloaded in ultra-high-res at http://bit.ly/dreamscapephotos1

 My hasty dreamscape construction photos can be browsed or downloaded at http://bit.ly/dreamscapephotos2

www.icehotel.com

- Alex

[atmosstudio]

Asaf Kliger also sent through this pic of Aditya & I looking a little pinned by the weight of frozen cradled water, just alongside the Torne River in Jukkasjärvi.

www.icehotel.com

- Alex

[atmosstudio]

Dreamscape - scanning through the tentacles

Here’s a short video, briefly animating a clipping plane running parallel to #dreamscape’s angled bed in order to slice through snice and ice and snow and flesh to reveal the project within, before returning upon itself…

You can also view it on YouTube at https://youtu.be/hj8RkrOMeV4

( shortened to http://bit.ly/dreamscapeanim1  )

You can also view it on YouTube at https://youtu.be/hj8RkrOMeV4

( shortened to http://bit.ly/dreamscapeanim1  )

[atmosstudio]

Dreamscape - the drawings

We decided to create some architectural drawings to clearly explain the way the structure works, and the drama of the space.

They can also be downloaded from http://bit.ly/dreamscapedrawings

[atmosstudio]

Dreamscape - carving the columns

We spent weeks toiling to install these vast archives of river water, and in a sole day, we ripped them into organic columns - plunging first with chainsaw, and then caressing the ice with our chisel. It felt extraordinary. I’d never chiselled anything before.

Sanna had always warned me that the chisel would slide through the immovable  ice like butter, and indeed it did. Too easily. You could too easily spend 10,000 strokes labouring over a finessed joint, and then with a haphazard stroke as you get up to leave, nick and wreck the effect of the whole. Occasionally the ice would crack and groan and emit its own elusive language.

I found myself instructing others on the fine art of how to reveal the intended junction between forms - buttocks, not breasts, I implored ;)

- Alex

[atmosstudio]

Dreamscape - the tentacles arrive

We created a substructure to reinforce the snow and enable it to span unfeasible distances. It felt a little like cheating, except that all material is in reality adulterated. You find all kinds of amazing things cast from the river’s past journeys inside the ice. And the whole building requires its own reinforcement for structural reasons. And we were using a sustainable resource - local plywood - to which the snow finally learned to love to stick.

I’ve always shied away from symbolic design, preferring forms to be instrumental and productive, productive and performative, but it’s hard  to avoid thinking of these curvaceous white protrusions as spatial neurons, emanating from the mind.

- Alex

[atmosstudio]

Dreamscape - we finish the stairs

Finally the blocks have been stacked and the last vast chunks of see-through masonry laid, and our flight is complete. It does, I think, look quite amazing - monumental, yet delicate. 

In our practice - there are so many tools we seem to love to leave up there - we’re getting incredibly practiced at running up and down these slippery treads, like mountain goats aside a cliff. It feels great. 

And it’s spectacular to climb and admire the view that no other room affords of its generous sectional void. It reminds me why we seem to do so many stairs - because they force drama from stasis, and conjure music from silence...

- Alex

[atmosstudio]

Dreamscape - the ICEHOTEL & 365

The ICEHOTEL is located in Jukkasjarvi, way up at te top of Sweden, in a (lap)land where culture cedes to the power of nature, and boundaries elide. You can find that parts of Norway wrap round and end up East of Finland. It’s roughly 200km north of the Arctic Circle, and 17 kilometres outside of  Kiruna - a strane industrial town ith 500-kilometres of underground road within the mine that supplies Europe with 80% of its iron. It takes workers over an hour to drive down into the depths of this vast maze, way past strange intergalactic machines with tyres so vast they each cost more than 50,000 Euros. Kiruna is slowly slipping into the mine, but the mine has money - enough to pay for the voluntary relocation of its entire population. They’re literally moving the whole city.

The ICEHOTEL has also always been a space on the move. It was the world’s first Ice Hotel, begun as an art project in 1989 as an alternative to the usual focus on its antithesis - the eternal sunshine of Swedish midsummers. Art has always been integral to its core ideal - as a place to explore the depth and extremity of a wilder nature, but also the soulful response that it triggers in mankind. Apparently its founde, Yngve Bergqvist, was inspired by the traditions of Japanese ice sculpting (Sapporo has hosted an ice sculpting festival since 1950). But Bergqvist and his fellow sculpters were soon in search of a Swedish language- a search perhaps echoed by the vast, monochromatic, almost minimalist shapes that generously pepper the grounds at Jukkasjärvi. Since they started, the hotel has invited over 500 artists to come create new temporary homes and retreats for their visitors.

It harvests its building and art material directly from the adjacent Torne River, which widens to demarcate the border between Sweden and Finland before eventually discharging South into the Baltic Sea. Snow and Ice are harvested before the river ice melts in the spring by a gigantic circular saw they wheel out onto the frozen current, the plunder stored over the summer in a local ice storage unit (powered by solar electricity and warmed by geothermal energy) before being used the next winter to create a complex offering 80 rooms and suites. The building utilises 100,000 tons of ice and 30,000 tons of snow (about 700 million snowballs) - 1,000 tons of which are prevented from rejoining the Torne River & instead are frozen and recycled into the following year’s hotel.  Their website has a range of interesting stories and histories to explore.

We got involved for a wholly new venture - called 365. It is a world first - the only Ice Hotel of its kind projected to run all year round, 365 days a year, and thus offer ice and snow to even midsummer travellers. The 2,100m2 building contains a vast central Ice Bar and a corridor leading to 20 artist-designed rooms and suites. It uses a highly innovative series of custom cooling technologies to keep its thick snice walls chilled throughout the year, and thick layers of insulation beneath an undulating green roof that invites the summer visitor to climb and explore its landscape beneath the sleepless midnight sun. One night we climbed on that roof and were barraged by another form of luminance - the swirling fireworks of the Northern Lights.

The whole project is an incredible experiment. I learned on arrival that ice sublimates; it jumps state, and can leap from solid to gas. They showed me pictures of how some ice columns in certain suits over the years have melted into the most incredible and unruly of forms. The incredible Swedes that we’ve dealt with personify that perfect mix of can-do pragmatism and heartful creativity, ploughing a new furrow that leads into a brave new world. The demandingness of their materials have made them incredibly resourceful - and resilient - and human. We arrived to a bubbling community without ego, where everyone pitched in to help another, and artists laid down their own tools to work for the greater good. It’s been an inspiration, and we’ve been extremely fortunate to have received a great amount of help from some wonderful people - most especially its creative director, Arne Bergh; its head of artistic support, Sanna Porter Öhman, and its technical director, Mats Nilsson - and the wonderfully talented and generous artists we’ve worked with Tjåsa Lucia Gusfors, Luca Roncoroni, and the amazing Lithuanian strongman, Vitautas.

The ICEHOTEL has a combination of 150 warm and cold beds. They recommend that their visitors only spend 1 of 3 nights in the actual ice-cold art suites, which are opened to public tours during the day. You leave your clothes in the dressing room, and snuggle deep into an artic sleeping bag, dreaming above reindeer skins. The snow actually insulates its interiors from the effects of outside temperatures, which can drop to -40. Energy is generated by a 6,500 ft2 array of solar panels - a ballet of snow and ice.

At the other end of the corridor from us lies the vast central Ice Bar, adorned with chandeliers which bear more than 1,000 hand-carved refractive ice crystals. We’re flattered to hear that apparently this year they’ll be serving a cocktail named after our suite - Dreamscape.

- Alex

 http://www.icehotel.com/

http://www.icehotel.com/hotel/rooms/365-en/art-suite-365/

[atmosstudio]

Dreamscape - designing with the weather

We’re building with water.

It’s already fairly mind-boggling that our seemingly-solid bodies are actually evanescently aqueous - but it’s occasionally almost disturbing that we’re seeking to build a structural immersive environment from just one fairly simple liquid - water.

We’re working at way below sub-zero. The general temperature of the 365 building is chilled to -5 degrees centigrade to ensure ice stays solid and snow stays on the walls and ceilings. Though, inevitably, as the gates open to let tractorloads of deliveries through, warmer evenings disturb the mix - and so do cold. A recent cold snap has played unexpected havoc with some of the snice machinery. Everyone in the building becomes hyper aware of every climbing or falling degree - and the merciless vicissitudes of that invisible tyrant, temperature.

 We cleave and heave vast blocks of ice, yet have to ever so delicately tap them to nudge them into place. A moment’s impatience can easily unravel a day of patient work. After deep exertions, we stand there panting with pipettes, delicately squeezing precious droplets of water into fissures between our blocks - its new frozen state a welcome mortar to bind our elements together. It feels strange that at one moment we pore with the water of our own exertions, or wipe a salty cold-driven tear, and at another we’re enlisting droplets as the key glue to our structures.

It feels wonderful to be able to source all your building material; to point to the Torne River outside (which was free-flowing a week ago and is now frozen stiff), and know that it’s the mighty parent of all the material you’re working with - and that possibly these children you’ve shaped will one day rejoin that flowing family…

 (Here’s a stunning  video that the ICEHOTEL made about the importance of that river to their work…

[atmosstudio]

Dreamscape - the aurora borealis!

Everyone downed tools and ran outside as above us danced this enormous green blurry veil.

Across the horizon, distant pink fireballs chased each other like firecrackers.

It was incredible. A seasoned ICEHOTEL veteran kept yelling in utter wonderment, gasping at his fortune to see once more the fabled Northern Lights. How humbling of our meagre little architectural creation of an experience; how pale and static we suddenly felt...

- Alex

[atmosstudio]

Dreamscape - we rise with the stairs

At last - the stairs arise. We’ve only carved and stacked 3 of our 12 behemoths, but it already feels incredibly intrepid to climb their perilous mounds and stand at the top, hovering in mid-air, held up only by water…

- Alex