Land Art Generator Initiative

LAGI PROVISIONAL CONCEPTS 2009
(Designed by Robert Ferry & Elizabeth Monoian)

Ibn Al Haytham Pavilion for Mushrif Park: 150KW
The first camera obscura was built by Arab scientist Abu Ali Al-Hasan Ibn Al-Haytham, born in Basra (965-1039 CE), who carried out practical experiments on optics in his “Book of Optics”. In his experiments, Ibn Al-Haytham used the term Al-Bayt al-Muthlim, translated in English as dark room. In the experiment he undertook in order to establish that light travels in time and with speed, he wrote: “If the hole was covered with a curtain and the curtain was taken off, the light traveling from the hole to the opposite wall will consume time.” He reiterated the same experience when he established that light travels in straight lines. A revealing experiment introduced the camera obscura in studies of the half-moon shape of the sun’s image during eclipses which he observed on the wall opposite a small hole made in the window shutters. Concentrated photovoltaic (CPV or HPVC) technology concentrates sunlight through a lens onto a high performance solar cell, thus increasing the electricity generated over conventional PV panels. Typical photovoltaic panels only convert about 10 to 15 percent of incoming light into energy. CPV cells utilize multijunction photovoltaics which can reach efficiencies of 40 percent.

Typically the CPV solar cell lies directly beneath the fresnel lens or parabolic mirror concentrator. In the Ibn Al-Haytham Pavilion, this type of system is modified to create beams of vertical light with the power of 800 suns by concentrating sunlight through fresnel lenses at the roof. These beams are then re-concentrated at the raised floor level by a second fresnel lens field and onto the CPV cells which are arrayed in a naturally cooled plenum space at ground level.

Download the Ibn Al Haytham Design Boards