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 ( oosterhuis@oosterhuis.nl) 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. M.Biloria@tudelft.nl) is an architect and an
assistant professor at Hyperbody, TU Delft, The Netherlands.
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