An international symposium takes place on Friday and Saturday, April 26 & 27, 2013 at the Faculty of Environmental Design at the 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 will go beyond this current fascination with mechatronics and will explore what change means in architecture and how it is manifested: buildings weather, programs change, envelopes adapt, interiors are reconfigured, systems replaced. It will explore the kinds of changes that buildings should undergo and the scale and speed at which they occur. It will examine which changes are necessary, useful, desirable, possible…
Speakers include: Michelle Addington of New Haven, Connecticut; Philip Beesley of Toronto; Peter Cook of London, UK; Anna Dyson of New York; Michael Fox of Los Angeles; Usman Haque of London, UK; Edwin Hathaway of Santa Monica; Chuck Hoberman of New York; Robert Kronenburg of Liverpool, UK; David Leatherbarrow of Philadelphia; Greg Lynn of Los Angeles; Kas Oosterhuis of Rotterdam; Enric Ruiz-Geli of Barcelona; Brian Sinclair of Calgary; Tristan Sterk of Chicago; and Skylar Tibbits of Boston. The symposium is chaired by Branko Kolarevic and Vera Parlac of Calgary.
The event is organized by the Laboratory for Integrative Design (LID). For more information and to register, please visit www.buildingdynamics.org. Early-bird registration ends on Friday, April 5, 2013. Symposium presentations will qualify for AAA learning hours (LH).