Concrete Canopy

For Nuit Blanche London 2025, Concrete Canopy transformed the historic Kingsmill’s Department Store façade into a living digital organism — a place where architecture and nature merge in an evolving audiovisual symphony. Vegetation climbed the stone, flowers opened across the window bays, and the building appeared to be reclaimed by the growth it had displaced.

The piece was participatory by design. Rather than playing a fixed film at the crowd, it handed the controls over: a custom web application put visitors in a queue on their own phones, and each person in turn got thirty seconds to shape the visuals and the generative soundscape in real time. Nobody watched the same show, because the show was being made by whoever was standing there.

That turn-taking is the argument. A projection this size is usually something a city does to a street; this one only worked if strangers were willing to line up, take a turn, and hand it on. The tension between built and natural environments was the subject on the wall — collective responsibility for the shape of a city was the thing happening on the sidewalk.

Concrete Canopy was both visual poem and interactive playground: an invitation to listen, engage, and reimagine how we inhabit our cities.