At ONL, an architectural design firm in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and the Hyperbody Research Group at the TU Delft in The Netherlands, we have been designing an entirely new aesthetic, one based on the principles of customization. Mass customization of buildings means that all produced building components have a unique identity and are individuals that can be addressed independently. Each building component is different, and fits only in one place. The structure that is built becomes a giant 3D puzzle, where each piece fits exactly in one location, and the unique ID of each component is comparable to an IP address of a computer linked to the Internet. This new generation of Pro-active Architecture (ProA) is based on customization that respects the individuality of each component, building up a completely new aesthetic. ProA buildings are responsive to the individuals that live inside them, and to their environment. In the ProA concept, buildings are organic, ever-changing vehicles for processing and displaying information. They exhibit independent real-time behaviors, like adjustments in shape in response to changing environmental circumstances such as wind direction.

 

Figure 1. Sensorboard in Saltwaterpavilion.

At Hyperbody, we have instigated a series of interactive prototypes to study the design of such buildings. For the NSA exhibition in Centre Pompidou in 2003, we were invited by the curators to build a first installation, NSA Muscle. NSA Muscle is a proactive inflated space, its surface populated with a mesh of 72 muscles, all of which were addressed individually. In the installation, the muscles cooperated as a swarm of muscular actuators, so as to behave in real time. The NSA Muscle danced, hopped, twisted, contracted, and responded with subtle movements to sensor input coming from visitors touching particular locations on the nodes of the muscular mesh. The paradigm of ProA was created, appearing on the cover of the French daily newspaper Libération.

Our first truly interactive environment was the Saltwaterpavilion, realized in 1997. A weather station positioned at the North Sea sent data to a computer running Max/MSP, which informed a mixing table to produce a soothing massage of light and sound that refreshed every 20 seconds. The public could interact with this dynamic environment using a sensorboard, pushing and pulling lights and sound toward both extremes of the interior space (see Figure 1). Interactivity and architecture were designed from scratch with similar high budgets and at the same scale. Interactivity formed an integral part of the architecture for the first time in the history of architecture. Imagine if we could produce a swarm of such Waterpavilions, all