Back in January, in an entry on façades, I noted a recent, and relatively local, favourite – the extraordinary western face of the Brisbane Girls Grammar School Creative Learning Centre. Brisbane buildings have to posess a trick or two to deal with the fierce sun on their western side, and local firm m3architecture obliged with a protective layer of anodised aluminium slats, overlaid onto a wall painted with black and white stripes … which just happens to create a gigantic moiré effect as you move past it.
The school sits on a hill adjacent to the six-lane Inner City Bypass, and so commuters witness the entire six-storey façade undulating and revolving as they drive past. In my earlier post I promised a video of the thing in action and I'm yet to deliver, but in visiting the excellent (and aforementioned) 'Place Makers' exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane recently, I captured the next best thing – some rough videos of the exhibition's simplified 1:11 scale model of the western wall.
That is essentially exactly what it looks like, just 1:11 scale. The moiré effect is surprisingly simple, as this close up of the model indicates. (For the curious Wikipedia's definition of the moiré is worth a read.)
Some photos of the model at 'Place Makers', which is also simple but a very effective display.
Some images from an Architecture Australia article, indicating what it looks like in context:
m3 produced some notes on their design for the building on their website, though they don't reveal much detail about the provenance of the moiré idea – except perhaps in the phrase "dynamic space of circulation". I half-wonder whether the feathers of local parrots or the ubiquitous slats and blinds of Queenslanders' verandahs may have provided subconscious inspration.
m3 moiré façade videos at Vimeo
'Place Makers' and architecture scenes
'Place Makers', Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
m3architecture
City of Sound 
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