A team led by Philip Beesley presented Epiphyte Chamber at an exhibition in Seoul.
An experimental research team led by an architecture professor at the University of Waterloo has been awarded close to $2.5 million in federal funding to pursue a vision of living, breathing buildings.
Philip Beesley, a professor at the School of Architecture, said the multidisciplinary Living Architecture Systems Group aims to push the concept of smart, responsive buildings way beyond climate control and automatic doors at shopping malls.
Researchers and industry partners are looking 20 years out to the potential for architecture that anticipates the needs of its human occupants – even reading and responding to their emotions - and is integrated with the natural environment in ways that help, hot harm, the planet.
“This can transform the way architecture works in the world,” said Beesley, who has an international reputation for work in areas including striking, forest-like interiors and collaborations in couture fashion design.
Country-wide awards totalled $163 million
Funding for the work is being provided over six years by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, part of $163 million for almost 1,150 projects recently announced by Kirsty Duncan, the Minister of Science, for research across the country in a wide range of fields.
Waterloo researchers are in line for $5.7 million in all, including more than $75,000 for a project by School of Architecture professor Robert Jan van Pelt, renowned for his work examining the architecture of the Holocaust, on the history of a military building called the Barrack Hut.
In addition to Beesley, the principal investigator, three Waterloo professors – Dana Kulic of electrical and computer engineering, Rob Gorbet of knowledge integration and Colin Ellard of psychology – have prominent roles as stream leaders in the living architecture project.
Also involved as co-applicants, collaborators or partners are artists, scientists and engineers from numerous universities in North America, Europe and Asia, and organizations ranging from the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) to Clearpath Robotics of Kitchener.
The complex research features a network of experts in areas including advanced structures, mechanisms, control systems, machine learning, human-machine interaction, synthetic biology and psychological testing.
'Really quite transformative for architecture'
“All of those things together create a vision that really is quite transformative for architecture, changing it from static buildings that try to be permanent and immovable into dynamic, kinetic, environmentally responsive, adaptive environments,” said Beesley.
With roots at Waterloo going back 16 years, related research has yielded tangible advancements in areas such as the development of extremely efficient, lightweight structures and control systems capable of playfully interacting with people.
Down the road, Beesley imagines “deeply immersive environments” in which walls of synthetic ivy, for instance, produce oxygen and subtly move in response to human thoughts and emotions - possibly even expressing their own.
“That changes things from being static into having a kind of mutual relationship with human occupants,” he said. “It’s a very ambitious program.”