"ORAMBRA wants to produce buildings that can change shape"
Interview by S Parnell, Mark Magazine issue No. 31, April - May 2011
Like Ron Herron's Walking Cities, the vision of moving, evolving buildings is a fantastic, if far-fetched, idea. Watch- ing buildings slowly change shape in response to their surroundings is still the stuff of science fiction and the architecture student's thesis. But Tristan d'Estree Sterk and the Office for Robotic Architectural Media and Bureau for Responsive Architecture (ORAMBRA) are working on making shape-shifters a reality. Sterk studied at The University of Adelaide in the late 1990s, focusing on thermal performance and digital design. After working as an architect in London, Chicago, Vancouver and Boston, he set up ORAMBRA in 2000 (currently located in Chicago). I was eager to discover why and how these cybernet- ic dreams of the '60s and '70s were still very much alive - and to find out how much closer they are to reality.
How did your research into responsive environments come about? Tristan d'Estree Sterk: I was interested in the simple but beautiful 'form follows function' theory, although form can never really follow function, of course, because functions change with the passage of time. I believe that buildings have dialogues with their surroundings and that digital technologies - and responsive technologies, in particular - provide architecture with a set of strategies for consider- ing how people and spaces come together. The ways in which a building is affected by its context are bound to change.
What are the influences that led to this type of architecture? In the early '60s, Yona Friedman noted that architects were producing buildings for unknown occupants. He questioned the methodologies used by architects and stated that architecture should be a series of systems built from software and hardware components that could be given to occupants to use, thus altering the role of the architect. Friedman wanted to enable users to control the designs of the spaces they lived in - to manipulate such spaces to suit their personal needs. His ideas resulted in what was probably the earliest example of a programmable architectural methodology. Friedman envisioned a type of popular architecture by the people and for the people - one that would let an individual act as client, occupant and architect simultaneously. Friedman's ideas were soon embraced by other practitioners and researchers, including Gordon Pask, Andrew Rabeneck, Cedric Price, Allen Edwards, Sean Wellesly Miller, Nicholas Negroponte, Charles Eastman and Nigel Cross. Their subsequent work laid the foundation for repurposing the architect's role as a designer to that of a programmer.
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