Creativity Bytes: A Brief Guide To Interactive Architecture

Here’s a quick reference guide that will seek to explain the trends, terms, and movements of the brave new media world of art and technology. So you can skim, digest, and be a pseudo-expert next time you’re cornered at a Speed Show exhibition in your local cybercafe. Because, hey, life is short and art long. This week: Interactive Architecture.

So, what is interactive architecture?
It’s a type of architecture that is responsive to its inhabitants and environment via a feedback loop, creating a two way dialogue. Essentially, it’s a building that reacts to its surroundings, explores digital technologies and virtual spaces, and is “alive” insofar as it can sense, interact, fluctuate, adapt, and learn, changing depending on your needs. Taking in the fields of architecture, design, computer programming, and engineering, it’s a hybrid discipline that constructs adaptive environments for a hybrid media society.

Where did it come from?
The cyberneticians of the 1960s laid the foundation upon which interactive architecture was constructed with the idea that interactivity was a two way street, this and other ideas were adapted by the architects of the time for use in their work. Cedric Price was one, whose unbuilt Fun Palace (the source of inspiration behind the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), was to be a “laboratory of fun,” built in a grid-like steel structure where temperature systems would control fog, warm air, and moisture so it was responsive to the public’s needs. But it was a few decades before the tech caught up, over the 70s and 80s groups like MIT Architecture Machine Group (now MIT Media Lab) carried the torch by exploring the relationships between humans and technology, with artists and scientists from various disciplines experimenting with interactivity and design. In the 1990s, advancements in technology finally allowed for prototypes of IA to be made. The field is still in its infancy, many of its ideas only realized as installations, but give it a few years and we’ll all be living inside our own reactive robot home.

Cedric Price’s Fun Palace.

This week you’re really digging…
Jason Bruges Studio’s art-installation-meets-architectural-design project, Showtime, which was constructed for the façade of the W London hotel in Leicester Square, London (top). A responsive artwork that records the panoramic skyline and translates it into a performance of dancing lights in the evening. Also, Variate Labs power ranging Meta-Morphic Robotic Architecture, digitally “living” modular robotic systems made of parts that can communicate with one another and change shape, creating kinetic spaces in your home.

Nano talk
A growing multidisciplinary field that will only expand as technology improves and it becomes more economically viable, taking in nanotechnology, organic designs, dynamic environments, robotics, weather responsive buildings, augmented design, biomimetics, multitouch surfaces, and flying houses. Hopefully. If you want to read more check out the book Interactive Architecture by Michael Fox and Miles Kemp. Or if that’s too old school, try Miles Kemp’s blog Spatial Robots and Michael Fox’s teachings at Robotecture.

Variate Labs prototype for their robotic architecture

Describe yourself as…
Frankenstein Gehry.

Keywords
Interact, design, architecture, kinetic, responsive, robotic, intelligent, dynamic, flexible.

Difficulty level
Structural.

Age range
Cybernetic.

An animated demonstration of Variate Labs’ modules interacting in a dynamic home.

Tagline
Buildings in disguise.

To recap: Meetings (and conversations) with remarkable homes.

Next week: Noise music