Countdown down to Zaha Hadid’s Morpheus in Macau made larger than life by Dutch designer Maarten Baas
Baas has created a real-time clock installation, ‘Count:Down Clock’, in the at The Countdown Hotel in City of Dreams, Macau, to anticipate the opening of new hotel Morpheus by the late architect Zaha Hadid
Most of us probably use our smartphones to tell the time, others rely on their watches or clocks to do so. Award-winning Dutch designer Maarten Baas has a bigger idea.
Baas has created a real-time clock installation, Count:Down Clock, in the lobby and on the facade of The Countdown Hotel in City of Dreams, Macau, to countdown the launch of City of Dreams’ Phase Three and the opening of new hotel Morpheus – the world’s first free-form exoskeleton high-rise designed by the late architect Zaha Hadid.
In order to make the clock, Baas and his production team filmed six actors in real time as they painted and then wiped away the numbers denoting the hours and minutes of the day on hazy etched glass panels.
“The first thought was to make it look like real men were all individually making a digit,” says the 39-year-old designer, whose works are often viewed as being rebellious, playful, intellectual, theatrical and artistic. “There are digits for hours and digits for minutes. So some digits have to go very fast and others only change every 100 or 1,000 hours.
