Let your watery imagination go wild, earlier this week an international team of architects and engineers led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they have designed a building made of water.

Called the “Digital Water Pavilion, the interactive structure made of digitally controlled water curtains will be unveiled at the 2008 Expo Zaragoza in Zaragoza, Spain, an international exhibition will be held between 14 June and 14 September next year.

“To understand the concept of digital water, imagine something like an inkjet printer on a large scale, which controls droplets of falling water,” Carlo Ratti, head of MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory said.

While all of the walls of the pavilion will be made of vertical digital water wall, along with partitions on the edge of the roof and inside the structure to accommodate for separate spaces, the pavilion water walled structure will also house an exhibition area, a cafe and a range of public spaces.

“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.” Mitchell added.

Covered by a thin layer of water and controlled by software, as well as sensors, the pavilion roof will be supported by large pistons that can move up and down.

“The “water walls” that make up the structure consist of a row of closely spaced solenoid valves along a pipe suspended in the air. The valves can be opened and closed, at high frequency, via computer control. This produces a curtain of falling water with gaps at specified locations - a pattern of pixels created from air and water instead of illuminated points on a screen. The entire surface becomes a one-bit-deep digital display that continuously scrolls downward” MIT said.

When it’s too windy, the roof will lower by design using sensors that can detect wind volume. In the same way, when the pavilion is closed, the entire roof will collapse to the ground and the whole structure will simply disappear. The water wall will also sustain 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 describes.

The digital water wall model was developed by MIT. While the design of the Digital Water Pavilion was carried out by the architecture office of carlorattiassociati in Turin, Italy, and Arup, engineering company in London, UK and Madrid, Spain, along with the help of landscape architects Agence Ter in Paris, France.