OVERVIEW
This studio explored how robotics is already integrated into architecture and how it might be re-thought by designers focusing on social and cultural interaction and experience over multi-functionality, flexibility or efficiency. Instead of replacing existing functions with robotics the students looked at innovations in design that will bring a new animated sensibility and liveliness to spaces and places. The Research Studio will culminate in a comprehensive design project that integrates motion elements into an architectural design of a freestanding building proposal in an urban context.
Robotics is already all over our cities, buildings and environments as digital technology and sensors are making our environments smarter, dynamic and adaptive. In order to accommodate, modify, improve or simply entice us, motion has been applied to different body types (ergonomic motion), changes in wind, temperature, sun or rain (dynamic climatic adaptation), passages (operable doors and windows), vertical transportation, lighting and even entertainment.
Each student will propose a robotic idea at the building scale that triggers a new relationship to the built environment rather than a discrete solution to a discrete problem.
Many of the innovations of Modernist architects transformed not only technical methods of construction but much more these inventions transformed the language of architectural form and space as well as the cultural paradigm for interacting with architecture and design. It is my ambition as this studio’s professor that each student will define some paradigm for animating architectural design that will have both multiple technical consequences for resolution and realization as well as profoundly transforming the language of design and spatial interaction.
