Making Architecture Dream: Refik Anadol and the Data-Painted Facade

In the autumn of 2018, in downtown Los Angeles, a single building changed its expression night after night. The Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry — the building known for its undulating stainless-steel skin — had a vortex of abstract imagery pour across its surface every night from 28 September to 6 October. Light rippling like a fluid, planes of colour suddenly unravelling into particles, luminance gathering back into a surface. What the people standing on the pavement and the lawn in front of the building were looking up at was neither advertising nor a projection-mapping show. It was footage produced by putting a century of records accumulated by an orchestra called the Los Angeles Philharmonic — photographs, audio, video and metadata amounting to 45 terabytes — through machine learning and having it "look again." The work was titled WDCH Dreams. Its subject was architecture dreaming, with its own memory as material.

The person who assembled that night's spectacle is Refik Anadol, a media artist born in Turkey and based in Los Angeles. This essay is an attempt to read the subject he has consistently pursued — the surface across which data flows — on the facade that faces the street. Not inside the walls of a museum but on the outer skin of a building in the city: how can data become a single tenkei there?

Data in Place of Paint

Anadol was born in Istanbul in 1985. He later took a master's degree in the Design Media Arts programme at UCLA, and remains based there. The words he returns to when describing his own method are "AI data painting" and "data sculpture." He takes vast datasets as primary material, treats the neural network as something like a collaborator, and crystallises its output into moving images and objects. At the core of the method is a metaphor: data in place of pigment, the machine's process of learning in place of the brush.

What grew this method into a consistent series is Machine Hallucinations, begun in 2016. It is a body of work in which collective visual memory — the accumulated mass of images of a city, of a natural phenomenon, of an archive — is used as training data, and the machine goes on generating images it has never seen. What matters is that what is generated here is not the reproduction of anything concrete: the distribution of the data itself is made visible as movement. A screen that keeps flowing without ever holding an outline, like cloud, or like water. That became the keynote of his expression.

In that same year, 2018, he also presented Bosphorus: Data Sculpture in his home city of Istanbul. Radar observations of the sea surface supplied by the Turkish State Meteorological Service — thirty days of the sea's movement — were visualised on a 12-metre-wide LED wall as a mass of fluid endlessly rippling and collapsing. A dream projected onto the skin of a concert hall; a sea rising on the LED wall of a gallery. The media differ, but the subject runs through both: to give a surface to something invisible called data, and make it stand up within a city or a space.

On the Outer Skin

The projection used for WDCH Dreams came from 42 large-scale projectors. A combined 50K resolution, eight channels of audio and a luminance reaching 1.2 million lumens turned Gehry's curved surfaces into a single screen. The material was the orchestra's entire archive, containing more than 580,000 image files, over 1,800 videos and over 17,000 audio files; several machine-learning models analysed this, broke it down into countless data points, and reconstructed it.

What happens here resembles the standard practice of projection mapping — fitting a picture to a building's bumps and hollows in order to produce the illusion of relief — without being the same thing at all. What Anadol projected was not a picture stuck onto the building but a flow that seemed to have been generated by the building remembering. The physical curvature of Gehry's skin and the fluid imagery the machine generates dissolve each other's outlines. Architecture becomes a screen, and the screen reflects the architecture's memory.

When people dream, the mind processes memories to form a new combination of images and ideas. Can a concert hall do the same?

— Refik Anadol Studiosource

The very way this question is posed indicates the reach of his work. The idea of making a building dream is supported by an attitude that treats architecture not as a fixed container but as a subject in its own right, one that stores, processes and expels data.

Three Minutes Open to the Street

The subject of the facade was sharpened further in Barcelona in 2022. Onto the organic outer wall of Casa Batlló — the World Heritage building designed by Antoni Gaudí — Anadol projected Living Architecture: Casa Batlló. Gaudí's sketches, the building's historical archive, scholarly material, and countless publicly available photographs: a dataset of roughly one billion images was used for training, and footage generated with Barcelona's climate data taken in in real time flowed across the rippling stone surface. Over several nights in May, close to fifty thousand people are recorded as having gathered on Passeig de Gràcia. The majority were not ticketed visitors inside the building but people who had been walking down the street and stopped.

Here lies the specificity of a data painting shown on a city facade. In a museum's galleries, viewing belongs to those who have come with intent. But the footage flowing across Gaudí's wall is open to the passing glance. On the way back from shopping, on the way home, one looks up and the building has temporarily turned into something else — that accidental encounter is an experience that can only happen on a facade on the street. Just as, in landscape painting, a small figure or boat drawn into the scenery kindles meaning across the whole view, the vortex of data flowing over a building at night produces a one-night tenkei in a familiar block.

The Museum as Counterpoint

In contrast with the street-facing skin, Anadol's work also cuts deep into the interior of the museum. Unsupervised, installed in the Gund Lobby of the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 2022 to 2023, is one of its high points. Metadata for the 138,151 works in MoMA's collection was trained with StyleGAN2, and footage in which the museum looks again at the history of its own holdings through the machine's eye was generated continuously on an LED wall about 7.3 metres high. At the entrance to a museum where the celebrated paintings of the permanent collection are on display, that same collection loses its outlines and goes on turning into something else. The subject of WDCH Dreams — a museum dreaming with itself as material — was repeated here on an indoor screen.

Indoor LED and the street facade. The traffic back and forth between these two sites is an important axis for reading Anadol's work. The indoor wall presupposes the institution of viewing — admission, dwelling, confrontation. The building's outer skin, by contrast, draws in even the passer-by who stands outside that institution. While holding the same technical core of a surface across which data flows, a work's social meaning becomes something entirely different depending on where it is placed. Just as Hong Kong's M+ Facade permanently operates a building's outer skin as a screen turned toward the city (When Architecture Becomes a Screen), data painting on an outer skin sits within a different economy and a different kind of gaze from the museum wall.

When the Screen Itself Becomes Architecture

And the subject of the facade reached its extreme point in Las Vegas in September 2023. "Sphere" — a spherical structure whose outer circumference is covered with nearly 580,000 square feet of LED — carries an exterior, the "Exosphere," known as the largest LED screen in the world. Anadol became the first artist to show footage on this skin: Machine Hallucinations: Sphere. Images of space made in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, more than 300 million photographs of the natural world, and generated footage taking in the wind and barometric pressure of Las Vegas in real time flowed across the colossal sphere visible from the night-time highway.

Here the movement that took place in WDCH Dreams, in which architecture becomes a screen, is inverted from the design stage onward. Sphere did not project footage onto an existing building; it is architecture whose outer skin was conceived as a screen from the start. Rather than a building having a screen, the screen has the shape of a building. On this sphere, Anadol's data painting arrived at a state in which the distinction between surface, architecture and image did not exist to begin with.

The Instant a Surface Becomes a Screen

Lining up Anadol's body of work from the viewpoint of the street facade, one subject surfaces: what he makes into the work is the moment of transition itself, in which the surface of architecture turns temporarily into a screen. Gehry's curves, Gaudí's stone wall, the sphere in Las Vegas — ordinarily they are there as architecture: as structure, as outline, as solid and certain matter. But at a certain hour of the night, when data pours in, that certain surface lets go of its outline for a moment and becomes flow.

This transition can also be read through the concept of ma (間). The building stops being architecture and has not yet fully become a screen — that suspended, vacated time. Anadol's data painting kindles meaning in that gap. As with tenkei in landscape painting, it does not redraw the scenery of the block itself. By kindling a transient image, night after night, above a familiar building, it gives the city's view another way of being read. Come morning, the facade is back to being an unremarkable architectural surface.

Data, which is by nature hard even to see and has nothing to do with the scenery of the street, becomes a visible flow for one night on the outer skin of a building. What Anadol's work shows is the possibility that when enormous computation meets an enormous surface, it need not end in the display of spectacle. Rather, in its best moments, it quietly adds a single point to the city's view — a small tenkei for someone passing by to look up at, stop, and walk on again.

Sources

1. fig.001WDCH Dreams: Relive the Epic Performance — LA Phil
2. fig.002Refik Anadol: Unsupervised — The Museum of Modern Art
3. fig.003Works — Refik Anadol
4. [4]About Refik Anadol — Official Site
5. [5]WDCH Dreams — Refik Anadol Studio
6. [6]Bosphorus: Data Sculpture — Refik Anadol Studio
7. [7]Living Architecture: Casa Batlló — Refik Anadol
8. [8]Refik Anadol dazzles 65,000 people with his mapping on the façade — Casa Batlló Contemporary
9. [9]Refik Anadol. Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA. 2021–2022 — MoMA Collection
10. [10]Refik Anadol, First to Transform Sphere's Exterior Into Immersive Canvas — Sphere Entertainment Co.