hipercroquis

Programmable structure changes shape in real time

The emotive house is fully industrial, flexibel in programmability, demountable, innovative, places domotics in an onther spotlight but will be general applyable in the near future ·

How innovative can a building be? · Becomes the architecture art, or does it remain a building? · Is it useful to design a highly innovative house like the emotive house, when no architect will try to build one? · The house must be considered as a lab that touches the emotional relationships between the house and the inhabitants, between the house and its guests and between the elements of the house itself ·

But the emotive house is only usefull when it is actually being build and it can be tested today · The emotive house is a testcase for extended reality · Traditional materials are augmented with a swarm of built-in technology · The construction of the house and the furniture becomes programmable · Everything changes, except the kitchen-area and the sanitary · The form of the emotive house is a long, movable space, with on both ends the solid blocks of the kitchen en the sanitary · De space in between can be changed from workspace to eatplace, to sleepingspace etc ·

10 years ago, this would be a fairytale, but now we can live in one · The space can be tuned, as well in its shape as in its information-content · Every combination of real space with a virtual image and/or information can be made possible ·In that way, the house will develop an own emotion, it can be reactor as well as actor · The acting will be made possible by a cooperative swarm of actuators like pneumatic beams, contracting muscles and hydraulic cylinders · The movement of the users and the changes in the weather are registered by a diversity of sensors, and are translated by the brain of the house into an action · In this way, the inhabitants and the actuators of the house will develop a common language so that they can communicate with each other ·

Programmable Structure

The structure is a weaving loom between a hard and a soft structure · The hard structure consists of massive wooden beams, and the soft structure are long-shaped inflatable chambers between the wooden beams · In this way, the chambers can expand and shrink to give a global shape to the emotive house · The total construction is being shaped by a spatial structure of hydraulic cylinders which are cooperating to follow or cause shape-movements · The hard structure on the exterior is covered with photovoltaic cells to generate electricity · The beams are connected with each other with pneumatic muscles, which can be contracted and relaxed · The technical challenge lies in the weaving loom of the programmable actuators and the hard structure, and in the cooperation between those actuators · They all have to work together like a flock · The scripts that need to be written are based on some simple rules for flocking behavior · The mathematical rules of behavior are known, but are never applied on structural parts ·

Multi-player Software

The Hyperbody-project, under supervision of professor Kas Oosterhuis, has gained a lot of experience with emotional response of programmable environments · The interaction here is build up by the game development program Virtools · Virtools has got a multi-player version which will be used here to play inside the house in real time · The players are the inhabitants, the guests and the actuators · There are also extern influences that can determine the interactivity · There is not always one solution when the extern and intern influences are written in real time into the brain of the house · The reaction will always be a complex consideration between lots of different factors · A complex consideration looks already like an emotion · We are aiming for an individual development of the character of the house, the experiment implies learning to live in an environment with an own mind ·

Credits

date: 2002

site: rotterdam

project architect: prof ir kas oosterhuis

design team: kas oosterhuis, ilona lénárd, gon zifoni

client: onl

[via onl]