Scripting Cultures: Architectural Design and Programming

Chapter 10

Performative scripting

This final worked example gives an overview of a discernibly deepening engagement with performative architecture worldwide. Buildings that physically adapt to changes in environmental circumstances are part of an emerging architecture for which real-time-responsive performance is seen as a major opportunity. As sensor and actuator technology catches up with digital computation, the imagined near future will become closer to achievable reality. Drawing on a number of influences, most notably the natural world, it seems that we are ultimately on a quest for an architecture that has the same degree of responsiveness that organisms manifest with their highly evolved active adaptation to shifts and alterations to both cyclical and unexpectedly sudden changes in their environment. At its simplest this means buildings with sensors that track the movement of the sun advantageously in the way that a sunflower first opens up to receive the sun’s rays at daybreak, then follows those rays during the course of the day. Buildings might be designed to do the same, nor is this an entirely 21st-century idea. In the Italian province of Verona, for example, the revolving house Villa Girasole (‘sunflower house’, constructed 1929–35) was the inspiration of the structural engineer Angelo Invernizzi in collaboration with the architect Ettore Fagiuoli.

Active rather than passive performance

The word ‘active’ is key to the principal argument in this concluding chapter. ...