You may have heard about New York City's latest public art installation, "The New York City Waterfalls", introduced last week. New York built four temporary 90- to 120-foot-tall waterfalls that pour about 35,000 gallons per minue of water into the East River. This 15.5 million dollar carbon-neutral art project was built even though it required permits from 30 federal, state and local agencies. This is good, but not great.
Now, maybe what you haven't heard about is the high tech curtain of water flowing in Spain. Currently Spain is hosting Expo Zaragoza 2008, an international exposition in the Spanish city that focuses on water and sustainability from more than 90 countries.
I have been waiting for some actual videos to show up on YouTube of the MIT-designed building with walls made entirely of water. Hailed in Time Magazine in 2007 as the "Best Invention of the Year" in the field of architecture, The Digital Water Pavilion, is an interactive structure where the water walls can be programmed to display images or messages, but can also sense an approaching person and automatically let them through. I finally found some first person video. See for yourself. Watch the ending and you can see the letters. Wow!
How does this work? 3,000 high-speed computer controlled solenoid valves can be opened and closed to produce a curtain of falling water with gaps at specified locations. This is like a large scale inkject printer that produces a pattern created from air and water.
Interestingly, the pavilion roof, covered by a thin layer of water, will be supported by large pistons and can move up and down. When there is too much wind, the roof will lower. Similarly, when the pavilion is closed, the whole roof will collapse to the ground and the whole structure will disappear. The water used is fully recycled with some of it supplemented by rainfall at the pavilion's site.
