BoingBoing posted this article about a building made from walls of water, but the way they titled their post (“Building made from water walls”) suggests that they aren’t focusing on what seems to me to be the coolest part of the whole idea.

At first glance, this seems pretty straightforward: Researchers at MIT are designing a “Digital Water Pavillion” for Spain’s 2008 Expo Zaragoza, consisting of sheets of water sprayed from suspended pipes. Here’s the amazingly cool part: Computer-controlled valves on the pipes can be opened and closed with extremely high accuracy, creating gaps at very specific locations. Which causes the surface of the “walls” to become a continuously-scrolling digital display of liquid pixels. The MIT news office says:

The facade of the water pavilion will be like a very large display, with text, letters, and interactive patterns. “You could throw a ball at the wall, and then see an open circle drop down to meet it precisely where and when its trajectory intersected the water surface. And, with suitable programming, touching the water surface at any point can propagate patterns horizontally, along the wall, to other locations,” Mitchell explains.

Equipped with suitable sensors, Water Walls can detect the approach of people and, “like the Red Sea for Moses, open up to allow passage through at any point,” said (William J. Mitchell, head of MIT’s Design Laboratory and former Dean of Architecture at MIT). “This provocatively subverts the fundamental architectural conception of an opening as something, like a door, found at a fixed location.”

My mouth, it is hanging open. There’s a photo and a little more commentary here on BoingBoing, along with some more links.