Isovist Studio

Content into architecture

Isovist

Isovist is a design studio that integrates content into architecture. Film and narrative, flight and environmental simulation, digital extensions of architecture, spatialized sound, sound built into objects: we calibrate each one to the space around it, so the story leads and the human experience follows.

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01 / Practice

The opportunity lives in between.

We work in the relationship between content and architecture, where a story can reshape a room and a room can reshape a story. That relationship is the work, and how visitors move through it.

Film & narrative

Space built to carry a story, from set to sequence.

Simulation

Architecture calibrated to motion: flight, transit, and other simulated movement.

Digital extension

Screen, movement, and environmental systems that extend and manipulate the architecture itself, not confined to a museum wall.

Spatialized sound

Sound tuned to a room, and sound built into the objects inside it.

02 / Clients

Who we've worked with.

A running index of collaborators, and what got built between their content and the architecture that holds it.

Maya Lin

What Is Missing? · 2008 to present

Content production and implementation of multi-channel video and audio for Lin's ongoing memorial about species and places at risk of disappearing. The same content, restaged as a different architectural condition at every venue: a media wall in one building, a full-room installation in the next.

Installed at the Beijing Center for the Arts, Princeton University Art Museum, the Li Ka Shing Foundation, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Pace Gallery, the Hudson Museum, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Bloomberg in New York, and EXPO Chicago.

View the project ↗

Museum of Ice Cream

Cherry Room, Subway, Milky Way

Two kinds of content built directly into circulation: an immersive ride, Subway, that carries visitors on a narrative journey through an ice cream themed landscape in New York and Chicago, and two fixed environments, Cherry Room and Milky Way, authored around a Chicago footprint that already existed. The architecture set the boundary; the content worked inside it.

Knoll

Flagship store, Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris

A multi-story, live-action film built into the storefront architecture of Knoll's Paris flagship, playing on the cinematic history of the city with the furniture cast as the main character. It told the love story of Hans and Florence Knoll: the building's facade became the screen, and the film's pacing was set by what a person sees walking past at street level. Content production and implementation, produced by WIKA Studio.

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Also working with

Rockwell Group, ESPN, Ogilvy, and Malin+Goetz.