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. It is precisely this fine attunement to life that has made these emerging technologies pertinent in dealing with a wide range of issues from the therapeutic benefits to the body, to the mediation of global and climatic energy systems. The projects featured in this book demonstrate in working prototypes architectural applications of synthetic sentience in the broad research area of ambient intelligence, focusing on: Immersive Spaces, Hybrid Living Systems, Responsive Cladding, Surface as Interface, Augmented Building Technologies, and Individuated Experience. Initial informal efforts have evolved with this team into a focused and funded university-based research. The projects establish a collaborative platform involving designers, scientists, and engineers and a new family of spatial problems where, architecture is re-charged.
About the Author: Rodolphe el-Khoury is Dean of the Miami University School of Architecture. He was Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto, Head of Architecture at California College of the Arts, and associate professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design. El-Khoury was trained as a historian and an architect; he continues to divide his time between scholarship and practice with Khoury Levit Fong. His books on eighteenth-century European architecture include The Little House, an Architectural Seduction, and See Through Ledoux; Architecture, Theatre and the Pursuit of Transparency. Books on contemporary architecture and urbanism include Monolithic Architecture, Architecture in Fashion, and States of Architecture in the Twenty-first Century: New Directions from the Shanghai Expo.Christos Marcopoulos is an architect and assistant professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture at the University of Toronto. Prior to this, he was Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and lecturer at UC Berkeley. For several years he worked as a project architect at OMA (Rem Koolhaas) in Rotterdam and SOM in San Francisco. He is a founding partner in the design practice, Studio n-1 (2000). His work operates across several scales focusing most recently on the intersection of architecture and responsive technologies. He is a founding member of RAD, Responsive Architecture at Daniels, which is probing the impact of responsive systems on the physical environment toward health and environmental applications. He is a co-editor of Wild Wild Urbanism, Redesigning California [CCA 2006]. His work has been acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has been published widely in academic and mainstream media including The New York Times Magazine, Praxis, and Journal of Architecture.Carol Moukheiber is an assistant professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture at the University of Toronto. Prior to this, she was Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco for several years, and worked for design offices including SOM, and Bruce Mau Design in New York and Toronto. She is a founding partner in the design practice, Studio n-1 (2001). Her work operates across several scales focusing most recently on the intersection of architecture and responsive technologies. She is the founder and director of RAD, Responsive Architecture at Daniels, which is probing the impact of responsive systems on the physical environment toward health and environmental applications. She is the co-editor of Wild Wild Urbanism, Redesigning California [CCA 2006]. Her work has been acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and her built work has been published widely in academic and mainstream media including The New York Times Magazine, Praxis, Journal of Architecture, and MONU (Magazine on Urbanism).