Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
Orbital serves as both an iconic gateway and a vibrant gathering point, offering space for anything from quiet reflection to lively celebration.
Photo credit:
Matthew Millman
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
A contemporary garden folly, Orbital explores geometric and material exuberance.
Photo credit:
Matthew Millman
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
The sculpture evokes organic forms found in nature, as well as giant robots and futuristic space vehicles.
Photo credit:
Matthew Millman
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
The faceted exterior is cloaked in a constellation of fine perforations, while the fluid interior reveals a tactile surface of colorful shingles. By night, these layers become a lantern of diffused light, casting an ethereal glow.
Photo credit:
Matthew Millman
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
Whether visitors pause to take in its sculptural form or spend time within its colorful interior, Orbital creates a memorable, immersive experience that encourages connection.
Photo credit:
Matthew Millman
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
On the inside a color field surprises, but also grounds the visitor to pause, look up, experience and interact with pattern and form in a dramatically different way.
Photo credit:
Matthew Millman
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
Orbital explores ways of bringing together these two worlds and creating an artwork that can be experienced in various ways. On the outside a textured, tessellated, high definition surface articulates a towering structure that anchors the site, providing a visual identity.
Photo credit:
Matthew Millman
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
The exterior and interior skins of the structure are geometrically similar, but materially distinct tessellated and shingled modules. The highly reflective exterior is contrasted by a tactile and colorful interior.
Photo credit:
Matthew Millman
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
At its core, this project emerges from FUTUREFORMS' co-founder Jason Kelly Johnson’s mastery of digital craft—where computation becomes a language and fabrication a form of authorship.
Photo credit:
Matthew Millman
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
Weatherscape is a sculptural canopy that channels dynamic weather conditions triggering optical, material and sound effects in multiple ways.
Photo credit:
Brian Wancho
Advertising
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
Weatherscape creates overlapping micro-climates on the terrace of the museum.
Photo credit:
Brian Wancho
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
In an urban Texan environment, where intense sun and high temperatures dominate, Weatherscape’s canopy offers both shaded comfort and visual engagement.
Photo credit:
Genaro Limon
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
Detail of Weatherscape’s canopy, which offers both shaded comfort and visual engagement.
Photo credit:
Genaro Limon
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
These metals do not warp, fade, or deform under intense heat or shifting temperatures, making them ideal for places like El Paso, Texas with strong sun and seasonal extremes.
Photo credit:
Brian Wancho
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
Weatherscape was envisioned as fundamentally playful—an open invitation to curiosity, much like a collection of petri dishes set out for experimentation.
Photo credit:
Genaro Limon
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
By combining utility with aesthetic expression, shaded artworks like Weatherscape transform public spaces into inviting, social, and visually engaging environments that respond directly to the local climate.
Photo credit:
Brian Wancho
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
More than a shade canopy, Weatherscape embodies the creative spirit of El Paso—playful, inventive, and full of energy. It becomes a place of reunion and reflection, where families and friends gather, and where movement is felt as much as seen.
Photo credit:
Genaro Limon
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
Each element is a test site for natural phenomena: light bending and scattering, water rippling across surfaces, air shifting through perforations, reflections flickering in motion, refractions casting unexpected color.
Photo credit:
Genaro Limon
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
Positioned at the intersection of art and architecture—particularly within the realm of public art—Weatherscape seeks not only to create a distinctive physical encounter for its visitors but also to shape a site’s visual identity and inspire community engagement.
Photo credit:
Genaro Limon
Defining a New Urban Experience Through the Lens of Digital Craft
FUTUREFORMS
Weatherscape encourages discovery through interaction and observation, allowing viewers to experience the invisible forces that shape our environment.
Photo credit:
Brian Wancho
Advertising