Make Alive Prototypes for Responsive Architectures

Edited by Rodolphe el Khoury / Christos Marcopoulos and Carol Moukheiber

The migration of computing from dedicated appliances to physical environments, thanks to increasingly proliferating microchips and ever-expanding information networks directly implicates and empowers architecture as a transformative agent and medium. The fact that objects can now sense, think, act, and communicate with the help of embedded technology is opening up the potential for an architecture that is more closely aligned with the networked dynamics of living systems – a sentient architecture.

The technological enhancement of physical matter charts a movement away from a mechanical paradigm towards a biological model. The shift manifests itself on several levels, from the micro scale in the form of new composite or “smart” materials capable of registering and responding to external stimuli, to larger network formations between people, objects, spaces, and landscapes. Radical artifice here serves to imitate nature, enmeshing built environments in a complex web of interactions whose emergent properties approximate the resiliency of natural ecologies.

It is precisely this fine attunement to life that has made these emerging technologies pertinent in dealing with a wide range of issues from the therapeutic benefits to the body, to the mediation of global and climatic energy systems. The projects featured in this book demonstrate in working prototypes architectural applications of synthetic sentience in the broad research area of ambient intelligence, focusing on: Immersive Spaces, Hybrid Living Systems, Responsive Cladding, Surface as Interface, Augmented Building Technologies, and Individuated Experience. Initial informal efforts have evolved with this team into a focused and funded university-based research.

The projects establish a collaborative platform involving designers, scientists, and engineers and a new family of spatial problems where, architecture is re-charged.

Make Alive Prototypes for Responsive Architectures

Book Size: 7.25 x 9.25 in / 184,15 x 234,9 mm Format: Portrait Pages: 296 Language: English Photographs: 300 Illustrations: 200 Edition: Softcover with 3/4 flaps in slipcase (978-988-16194-6-4)

House Equanimity Joseph N. Biondo (Masterpiece Series)

Foreword by Wendy Ornelas Introduction by Byron Hawes Epilogue by Joseph N. Biondo Photography by Steve Wolfe Edited by Oscar Riera Ojeda

Not all masterpieces scream for attention. Some wait with patience, with composure, for their genius to be felt. Joseph Biondo’s Equanimity House is just such a work of art; the exceptional, hiding in plain sight. Born of a tectonic language, the structure is built to coalesce with its surroundings, becoming one with the rolling topography of its site. A mature, elegant, considered work of great beauty, Biondo has achieved the apogee of his exploration of ordinary materials in extraordinary ways. As he says, ‘To heighten one’s awareness of a humble material can be poetic’. A sensorial tone poem, this is a house that is felt, rather than viewed, driving the senses that intuit gravity, temperature, interaction, texture, and aesthetics.

Book Size: 8,5 x 11 in / 216 x 279 mm Format: Portrait Pages: 200 Language: English Photographs: 160 Illustrations: 68 Edition: Hardcover (978-1-946226-06-8)