The Mechanical Inventions are Part of a Larger Intention to Graciously Accommodate Specific Situations and Events

Harry Marck^*
*Correspondence: Harry Marck, Department of Architecture and Design, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands, Tel: 20034871227, Email:

Commentary

The use of responsive components in architecture has the potential to improve the building's experience by allowing transitory, variable parts of the environment to be expressed. Responsive buildings allow specific building elements to respond physically to changes in the environment in some circumstances, these responsive elements form an intrinsic and lyrical element of a culturally significant piece of design. In this work, I look at two forms of responsiveness: one that deals with the changing environment, and another that deals with the actions and requirements of the building's occupants. The scene must have been spectacular and unprecedented for the first visitors to standing in the open plaza and gazing up at the numerous mechanical diaphragms installed in the glazed south front. The sight and sound of movement in each mechanical diaphragm across the facade, coupled with the knowledge that this movement was linked to the continuously varying modulation of sunlight, must have astonished the building’s early visitors. It’s easy to forget that Jean Nouvel’s pioneering use of responsive components was ground breaking in terms of scale, intricacy, and architectural ambition when it was built. The promise of this idea was an architecture based on change: a response to changes in the external environment and a matching adjustment of inside conditions. Each of the building’s façade, including the internal courtyard's translucent panels, provided a different solution to day lighting and dealing with natural light’s inevitability. Many types of building automation are increasingly prevalent, and sensor networks have been widely used in buildings to monitor and control various aspects of the built environment in recent years. Sensors are often used to detect indoor and outdoor climate variables like humidity, temperature, and solar radiation, as well as to identify patterns in people’s activities. These automated parts of buildings have occasionally played a vital aesthetic and cultural function in the construction of engaging architectural environments, in addition to their frequent instrumental role. The Institute du Monde Arabe’s automated diaphragms are an example of a dynamic building element that was intended as an important, defining aspect of a significant work of architecture from the start of the design process. All aspects of the building that adjust to people's requirements as well as changes in the environment are referred to as responsive components. These elements could be high tech systems that use sensor networks and actuators to monitor the environment and automate the operation of movable building components. I'm also referring to the movable, operable, and frequently manually controlled parts of structures that enable for the adjustment of the building envelope and interior to modify the building's performance to meet daily needs. The phrase is occasionally applied solely to automated responsive components in buildings, ignoring the strong link between manual and automated procedures. There’s also the possibility that the relatively new phenomenon of automated building components will be informed by a long tradition of design excellence in manually operated mechanisms, which achieves a remarkable level of poetic expressiveness through mechanical adjustment. Buildings fixed elements include their placement in the landscape and their structure, both of which alter rarely if at all during the course of their lives. However, if a building’s behaviour were completely static, it would be unable to cope with the wide range of variables that characterise everyday living. Weather changes, changes in people’s behaviour, and changes in their requirements all necessitate a certain level of adaptability and change. By necessity, architecture involves static and fixed elements: human survival depends on keeping a steady core body temperature, and our survival behaviour includes building shelters with a stable interior atmosphere. The preservation of these steady conditions is one of the most basic functions of the building's responsive components opening and closing windows, raising and lowering blinds and sunshades, managing fans and chillers and other air conditioning machinery. Despite the fact that we demand stability, we build our shelters to actively seek equilibrium through behaviours that require frequent adjustments to fit changing weather conditions. Responsive architecture, according to the broad definition presented in this paper, is any building or building component that is meant to react to changes in its surroundings. Responding to changing patterns of use (the activities of the building's occupants) or changes in the (exterior or interior) environment is the primary focus in the instances examined here. The rate at which these changes occur can be used to describe and categorise different types of responsive architecture. Cedric price, whose fun palace proposal established the ideal structure capable of adapting to the demands of its users, is one of the most significant writers in the theory of responsive buildings. The fun palace, with its temporary circulation and enclosures suspended from a space frame superstructure, was intended to radically transform the experience of architecture and had a strong influence on high tech architecture such as Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which follows the spirit of the fun palace with its visible expression of independence between structure, services, and skin, which was intended to increase flexibility in actuality.