ABSTRACT
Pilot buildings have become a common way of testing and demonstrating technologically advanced building solutions. Part of their appeal to researchers and practitioners is an alleged ability to speed up wide-spread introduction by exposing new technological solutions to routine use and operation. We distinguish two ways of performing pilot buildings. The more common one follows a technical logic of testing and demonstrating the feasibility of new technologies. We argue that within this logic, building occupants are reduced to passive recipients. The resulting open or hidden resistance towards new technologies causes pilot buildings to perform badly. We distinguish this technological logic from an approach to piloting, which takes seriously the contribution of occupants, their history and creative capacities. In what we call architectural anthropological navigation, pilot buildings become ‘lived spaces’, where outsider perspectives embodied by new technologies and architectural solutions are combined with the occupants’ experiential knowledge. We call for pilot buildings that are designed, implemented and used as spaces where engineers, architects and anthropologists, in collaboration with future-users, become co-designers of future building solutions. The chapter includes two stories about pilot buildings from Central Norway that demonstrate the flaws of a technological logic and allow us to describe opportunities for what we call architectural anthropological navigation.
