The Living, Breathing, Thinking, Responsive Buildings of the Future,
recently published by Thames & Hudson, UK. Edited by Rodolphe el-Khoury, Christos Marcopoulos, and Carol Moukheiber.
The book includes Cleo Buster's projects "Adaptable Insulation I & II" shown on this web site. (The project is listed under an alternate title, "Variable Insulation", and can be found on pp. 126-131.)
The book is for sale on Amazon.co.uk
Book Description: "One of the more exciting realities of 21st-century life is that objects are now able with the help of embedded technology to sense, think, act and communicate. Very soon, every building, city and landscape component will be equipped with communicative and computational capacities: we shall be surrounded by sentient architecture. This book documents the role of architecture in shaping this new reality in multiple research trajectories launched and guided by the authors at The University of Toronto, MIT, Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of Hong Kong. The projects establish an interdisciplinary platform involving artists, designers, scientists and engineers spanning different institutions and continents in a technological approach to spatial problems that is attuned to the dynamics of living systems. The collective aim is to develop from the collaborative experiments a digitally enhanced architecture that is well-equipped to handle persistent and emerging challenges in building a healthy and sustainable environment."
Abstract: “The migration of computing from dedicated appliances to physical environments, thanks to increasingly proliferating microchips and ever-expanding information networks directly implicates and empowers architecture as a transformative agent and medium. The fact that objects can now sense, think, act and communicate with the help of embedded technology is opening up the potential for an architecture that is more closely aligned with the networked dynamics of living systems – a sentient architecture. The technological enhancement of physical matter charts a movement away from a mechanical paradigm towards a biological model. The shift manifests itself on several levels, from the micro scale of new composite or “smart” materials capable of registering and responding to external stimuli, to larger network formations between people, objects, spaces, and landscapes. Radical artifice here serves to imitate nature, enmeshing built environments in a complex web of interactions whose emergent properties approximate the resiliency of natural ecologies.”