Ecological ballet - a design research towards environmental-reactive, adaptive architectural design

摘要

The present contribution reviews a set of architectural design studies that have been developed under implementation of adaptive - thus moveable - structures. The conceptual ideas behind the different design approaches are different, but all designs share the idea of interaction between the environment, the user and the building skin. While architectural theory and history show many examples of conceptual approaches toward moving, changeable or interactive buildings - for instance the walking cities of the Archigram Group - few realizations have been made, and even fewer approaches toward sustainability in these adaptive structures were conducted. The design concepts in this study, however, pursue the task to develope performative, interactive architectural concepts while following the necessity of highly energy-efficient building skins. Each project follows a procedural design process influenced by inspirations from natural (for instance prevailing wind direction) but also anthropogenic (for instance Japanese origami paper folding techniques) origin, and links these inspirations with thoughts for energetic, ecologic and environmental architecture. This procedural workflow in design led to five innovative concepts of different scales. These concepts were not only analyzed toward their potential realization, indeed they were constructed as scaled models that could react to environmental influences from outside or certain user inputs. These models use single-board microcontrollers and small electrical actuators to change their envelopes. The present paper presents the ideas and concepts of the designs, illustrates the realization of the scaled and fully operable models, and analyzes the potentials (and potential problems) of full-scale realizations. Furthermore, the projects are documented from the viewpoint of building physics and energy design. All projects were created in a specialized design studio at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and were shown in a one-day performance in the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna (MAK).