Exploring Architecture of Change

International Symposium, Friday and Saturday, April 26 & 27, 2013
Organized by the Laboratory for Integrative Design (LID)
Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary

We have seen over the past decade an increasing interest in the capacity of built spaces to respond dynamically to changes in external and internal environments and to different patterns of use. The principal idea is that two-way relationships could be established between the buildings and the environment and users. Changes in the environment (or users) would affect the configuration of built spaces and vice versa. The result is an architecture that self-adjusts – an architecture that is adaptive, interactive, reflexive, responsive.

By adding sensors, actuators and controllers to various systems, buildings are in a way becoming large scale robots. This symposium went beyond the current fascination with mechatronics and explored what change means in architecture and how it is manifested: buildings weather, programs change, envelopes adapt, interiors are reconfigured, systems replaced. It explored the kinds of changes that buildings should undergo and the scale and speed at which they occur. It examined which changes are necessary, useful, desirable, possible…