By introducing interactivity, we wanted to break the stereotype of the facade of a building as a barrier separating the interior from the external environment. The Muscle Facade (see Figure 8) moves and changes its visual appearance in accordance with fluctuating contextual conditions, such as the weather. The facade registers contextual information through a multitude of sensors and connectivity to global media (such as weather forecasts). This incoming data is processed by Virtools, and the Muscle Facade manifests its response by changing its own shape, the color of images projected on its surface, and the augmentation with sound.

 

CONCLUSION

Through the examples and experimentation described here, the potential importance of interactivity through organic reshaping of buildings as computers, and as computer displays, has become apparent. We realized that if we develop our buildings as flexible networked information processors, they become vehicles that can receive and transmit information to and from each other. Just like cars on the highway form a population of interacting moving bodies, just like houses in the city form populations, these interactive architectural bodies will form a network of live entities. All would feed on data produced by other buildings and elements, all would behave in real time, all would tell the others what

they did, and all would become a self-learning entity. Self-learning capacity will only arise if the architectural body will be part of a swarm, if it can communicate with peers. Then they may start building up a body of knowledge, perhaps not unlike its human inhabitants. Our minds are completely helpless and uninformed if we do not communicate with peers. Our body of knowledge does not reside in any one brain, but is embedded and distributed across a network of brains and bodies. It will be no different with these architectural bodies, the brains of which will feed on meaningful data from the Internet and other wirelessly transmitted semantic signals beyond the electricity used for metabolic operation. c

 

KAS OOSTERHUIS ( [e-mail]) is the chair of Hyperbody, the knowledge center for Nonstandard and Interactive Architecture, the director of the Protospace Laboratory, and a professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the TU Delft, The Netherlands. NIMISH BILORIA (N. [e-mail]) is an architect and an assistant professor at Hyperbody, TU Delft, The Netherlands.

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