ABSTRACT
An increased interest in exploring the capacity of built spaces to respond dynamically and adapt to changes in the external and internal environments is technologically and socially motivated. Advances in embedded computation, material design, and kinetics on the technological side, and increasing concerns about sustainability, social and urban changes on the cultural side, provide the background for the adaptive architectural solutions that have started to emerge. Could these responsive architectural systems act as ecologies in themselves and allow architecture as a discipline to recalibrate its role in the larger socio-economic context by becoming a more intelligent and operative participant – a participant imbued with foresight. This chapter provides a background and an overview of student projects that explore responsiveness in a variety of ways and at very different scales. The goal of each project was to develop strategies and attitudes to engage natural or manufactured processes directly in a design process; to work and design with these processes in order to form a productive relationship between a proposal, its users, and its environment; and to deploy technologies through the projects in order to speculate on future architectures that would emerge as a product of the fusion between architecture and technology.
