Designing Resilient Buildings with Emergent Materials

This paper looks at two distinct approaches to kinetic façades and smart building assemblies reminiscent of designs for the Institut du Monde Arabe and for Hoberman's Simon Center. The first approach uses Arduino microcontroller-guided kinetic components with a distinct assemblage of elements, each performing a dedicated function such as sensor, actuator, or logical processing unit. The second approach incorporates custom-designed smart materials-shape memory alloys (SMAs)-that not only complement or replace the need for electrically operated sensors or actuators, but also eliminate a microcontroller, since in this arrangement the material itself performs computational functions. The paper will discuss case studies that use physical computing and smart-material models as vehicles to discuss the value of each approach to adaptive design in architecture. Building on these observations, the paper looks into conceptual aspects of an integrated hybrid system that combines both computation approaches and unique opportunities inherent to these hybrid designs.