A Building Cloaked in Darkness

Khan has been working with Surrey NanoSystems, the manufacturer of the Vantablack nanotechnology, since 2013; he proposed using it in the UK Pavilion at Milan Expo 2015, but that commission went to another architect. It took South Korea's Hyundai Motor Company to turn the relationship into a tangible building, albeit a temporary one (the Winter Olympics take place 9-25 February 2018).

The inflected facades are punctuated by thousands of tiny white lights meant to resemble a field of stars against the depthless black surfaces. The interior, the exterior's antithesis, is white, devoted primarily to an installation made of water droplets.

​Khan's project for Hyundai links the exterior and interior environments to the carmaker's Hydrogen Fuel Cell car. Per a statement, the black facade represents "the universe, the origin of hydrogen," while the "interactive water droplets inside the building are inspired by individual hydrogen molecules."