If an environment could adapt to our desires,
it would have the ability to shape our experience. The projects in this chapter highlight the emotive possibilities of interactive architecture. There is a great deal of built precedence in interactive applications geared toward the evocation of feeling, ranging from those that simply provide pleasure to those that enable social engagement and contribute educational benefits. In the public realm, artistic structures such as sculptures, fountains, and facades have adopted interactivity as a vital component, inherent to the works in order to capture an audience. Museums as well have rapidly embraced interactivity with respect to the demands of presenting and viewing exhibits and artifacts. Interactivity combined with spatial adaptability can serve well the temporal nature of changing displays and visitors’ interaction with them. Many applications incorporate an educational component whereby kinesthetic learning is combined with entertainment experiences. Such applications enable users to utilize their bodies as well as their minds in collaborative ways. Children seem happy to learn when an entertaining interactive component is involved; being able to control the narrative engages them. While interactive entertainment is rapidly moving into the physical realm, it is a concept born of electronic media. The philosopher Marshall McLuhan lists “three key pleasures” that are uniquely intensified in electronic media: immersion, rapture, and agency. Immersion, he says, is “the sense of being transported to another reality”; rapture is the “entranced attachment to the objects in that reality”; and agency is “the player’s delight in having an effect on the electronic world.” In the world of entertainment, an engaging environment is by definition successful. Looking at the projects that follow, we see four very different installations that all work successfully to exhilarate. All of the projects express a critical dimension of time and transformation brought about by
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INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE
physical change. William Zuk and Roger Clark state in their groundbreaking book Kinetic Architecture that “our present task is to unfreeze architecture, to make it a fluid, vibrating, changeable backdrop for the varied and constantly changing modes of life. An expanding, contracting, pulsating, changing architecture would reflect life as it is today and therefore be part of it.”1 Kostas Terzidis explains that “deformation, juxtaposition, superimposition, absence, disturbance, and repetition are just a few of the techniques used by architects to express virtual motion and change.”2 He clarifies the polarity that while the form and structure of the average building suggests stability, steadiness, sturdiness, and immobility, the introduction of motion may suggest agility, unpredictability, or uncertainty and may also imply change, anticipation, and liveliness. The integration of motion into the built environment, and the impact of such results upon the aesthetics, design, and performance of buildings, may be of great importance to the field of architecture: “While the aesthetic value of virtual motion may always be a source of inspiration, its physical implementation in buildings and structures may challenge the very nature of what architecture really is.”3 It is important to understand that adaptation in this context is not quite as simple as satisfying needs. The architect Cheng-An Pan states: “Needs and desires change, permitting new options to be employed, allowing greater freedom of geographical movement, accepting personal whim, recognizing changing roles and functions, encouraging personal identity, reflecting mutations in economic levels, and adapting to any change which affects architectural form.”4 The implications of kinetic architecture touch upon building performance on one hand and aesthetic phenomenology on the other. At an architectural scale, projects often must do both. In the project titled May/September, installed by Urbana on the Eskenazi Hospital parking structure