Prototyping Architecture The Solar Roofpod
Preface by Barry Bergdoll Text by Christian Volkmann Close to 75% of primary energy in New York City is used in or for buildings. Amid the many different initiatives being implemented today to increase energy efficiency, it is clear that it is our built urban environment that needs the most improvement. Besides the fact that existing buildings have to be upgraded, the forgotten, interstitial spaces, where improvement can become architecturally tangible, should also be addressed.
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Make Alive Prototypes for Responsive Architectures 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.
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