MIP-MAPS Kiosk

The MIP-MAPS kiosk is inspired by the history of exploiting resolution as an architectural approach. During World War II, operating at the Chicago School of Design, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy developed cutting-edge techniques for camouflaging the city. A series of artificial islands and structures were proposed to move the shore away from Chicago, creating a facsimile version of the lake’s edge. The MIP-MAPS kiosk draws from this hidden history to propose a structure that becomes a low-resolution ‘island’ as a response to the state of the art today.

The term MIP-MAPS comes from a computer graphics technique used often in videogames and software such as Google Earth. A mip-map is a texture that contains multiple versions of itself at both high and low resolutions. As one moves closer to or further away from a structure using mip-maps, its level of detail changes and the architecture becomes ‘camouflaged’ through resolution. We developed the concept of a building using the voxel as its basic unit of space. A new architectural language is created through multiple levels of detail.