VENUE 121
NORTHEASTERN
UNIVERSITY VISITOR CENTRE
LIFE-SIZE, MULTI-TOUCH SURFACES AT NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY’S VISITOR CENTRE IN BOSTON, DESIGNED WITH THE AID OF PROJECTIONDESIGN TECHNOLOGY ARE ADDING A
SPECTACULAR INTERACTIVE DIMENSION TO A NEW LOBBY. SIMON DUFF TALKED TO INSTALLERS, CONSULTANTS AND MANUFACTURERS.
BOSTON, USA THE AMERICAS
Northeastern University is a private research institution located in the heart of Boston city, Massachusetts. Founded in 1898 it currently has just over 29,000 students and some 1,000 faculty members who are leading educators and scholars forging research partnerships around the world. It offers a range of undergraduate and graduate courses that focus on interdisciplinary and transitional research in a variety of subject areas, including business, computer and information sciences, engineering technology, health sciences, humanities and arts, law as well as physical and life sciences. A new visitor centre at the heart of the campus designed to become the portal to the Northeastern experience, opened last summer. The state of the art interactive facility located at the part of the campus known as West Village F offers the perfect shop window for the academic facility’s unique combination of assets, talents and opportunities to everything that is on offer at the university. Carved from an existing building, the new centre features three different large-scale interactive display areas in the lobby. It also showcases the high-quality optics, fl exible specifi cation, and consistent colour rendering of DLP projectors and
ProNet.precision software from Norway’s projectiondesign. The Boston architecture fi rm of William Rawn Associates was commissioned by the university to design the visitor centre, with Cavanaugh Tocci Associates acting as consultants for the AV system design throughout. Downstream Technologies designed AV content and interactivity with systems integration from Whitlock. The end result is a spectacular
combination of design and cutting edge technology and an aesthetic success in its own right. The interior of the lobby has translucent glass walls consisting of both projection glass and architectural glass that match. All of this glass has colour changing LED fi xtures top and bottom along the fl oor and ceiling behind the glass. These programmable LED fi xtures allow Northeastern to have an interesting and changing space throughout the day. They can also change the lights to match a holiday or local sporting event with a button push on the iPad touch screen control system. “The client brief was to create a high-tech, high-touch space that would really engage the 70,000 visitors who come to get a fl avour of Northeastern every year,” explained Matthew J. Moore of Cavanaugh Tocci Associates, a Boston fi rm of 14 consultants which provides acoustic, audiovisual and theatrical consulting services to a wide variety of architects, building owners and institutions. Between them, the architects, content people and Whitlock, a global AV solutions provider based in Richmond, Virginia with offi ces in California, evolved the idea of creating two large interactive video screens in the lobby, along with a ‘spinning globe’ that would underline the university’s commitment to international study. While one part of the Boston brief appeared to provide a free rein for the centre’s systems design, another part of it imposed signifi cant constraints. “The university wanted to make the technology disappear when it was not in use,” said Matthew.
www.mondodr.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172