Terminal 5 roof, Heathrow Airport

Elegantly swooping curve of the roof in one of the satellite sections of Heathrow Terminal 5. The big satellite sections are almost always echoingly empty, since they are used only for the biggest international jets, and people are summoned to them just before the flight begins to board. So you've got several football fields of open space and one or two patches crammed tightly with several hundred people each.

Heathrow Airport escalator

I love the big escalator in Heathrow Terminal 5 that takes one from the waiting area to the satellite gates. It goes down several stories, all in one big shot, and is very conspicuously one way in its gleaming channel.

Mercury drop sculpture, Charles DeGaulle Airport

 A sculpture looking like a suspended swarm of drops of mercury, in Charles DeGaulle Airport at the edge of Paris.

Artful gate, Paris

A lovely irregular pattern of fake stone and luminous red glass on an otherwise simple utilitarian garden gate in Paris.

Ceiling measure, IRCAM, Paris

Measures in the corners of the transforming performance space in IRCAM, to confirm how many meters high the ceiling is in a particular configuration.

 

Planar speaker, IRCAM, Paris

Mounted on the walls just above the first floor level in the transforming performance room is a giant planar speaker. It runs around all four walls of the room, and is made up of nothing more than ordinary good quality speakers stacked together side by side, meter after meter after meter. This allows artists to synthesize otherwise impossible auditory effects, like a performance in which you hear different pieces in different parts of the room, through ridiculously complex wave transformation calculations. I was told that IRCAM drives this with a supercomputing system, required to be able to run the performance in real-time. Apparently, IRCAM has been in supercomputing since its beginning, when they acquired one of the first Cray supercomputers ever allowed to be exported outside of the United States.

Transforming performance hall, IRCAM, Paris

 One of the major installations of IRCAM, this performance space can radically transform its shape and sonic properties, raising and lowering the ceiling and flipping around those panels on the walls to multiple different textures. Notice also the speakers dottted all around.