atmospheric spaces
vessel for distant and imaginary realities
2. THE MUTANT ARCHITECTURE As my main academic background, architecture and spatial design are always present in some way on my work. An especially predominant idea is what I will describe here as adaptive or mutant architecture, ambiances that present a symbiosis between the human body and space, and create a user-environment synergy. These spaces become in a way a tailored second skin, that reacts to whatever happens inside and/or around them. We could consider these spaces as leisure environments or mutant shelters that provide an interactive and adaptive built environment where the user is the protagonist with the ability to interact and modify them according to their needs and moods. Adaptive and interactive architecture has mixed with media and gamification and can be found in speculative projects from the 20th century, such as the settlement on legs from the 60s “Walking City”vi designed by Robert Erron, or its coetaneous reconfigurable “Plug-in City”vii by Peter Cook, both part of the english avant-garde collective Archigram. Another great example is the playful and high-tech “Fun Palace”viii designed by Cedrick Price, that would serve as influence for future built projects, like the “Centre Georges Pompidou”ix in Paris. In all of these examples, architecture turns playful and is able to transform itself, either by adapting its physical configuration or aspect, its content, or even its location. In 2016, using this framework as a design hypothesis, I developed my master thesisx in Architecture, designing a machine-like architecture that transforms and adapts, using gamification as learning process. 12