TOWARD PERFORMATIVE, ENVIRONMENTALLY RESPONSIVE ARCHITECTURE

Addressing the building’s appearance (“how it looks”) and its performance (“what it does”) requires creating environmentally attuned buildings, whose overall spatial and formal configuration is shaped by environmental performance with respect to light, heating, and cooling, embodied and operational energy, etc. Over the past two decades, we have also seen an increasing interest in exploring the capacity of built spaces to change, i.e., to respond dynamically-and automatically-to changes in the external and internal environments and to different patterns of use. The emphasis started to shift from the building’s scenographic appearance to processes of formation grounded in imagined performances, indeterminate patterns and dynamics of use, and poetics of spatial and temporal change. In such a context, the role of architects and engineers is less to predict, pre-program, or represent the building’s performances than it is to instigate, embed, diversify, and multiply their effects in material and in time.