This is a guest post from Antonina of OpenBuildings - a community-driven and openly editable encyclopaedia of buildings from around the world, and very soon also - www.Clippings.com, a new design-inspiration project by the team behind OpenBuildings. 

More than just ‘computation and kinetics embedded in architectural form’, interactive architecture has become instrumental in inciting outside-the-box communication among people, and also among people and their environment. Singular examples of responsive architecture could be traced back to as early as the 1930s. Cedric Price was perhaps the first and most influential of the pre-digital age architects to adopt the early theoretical work in cybernetics and extend it to an architectural concept of ‘anticipatory architecture’. But it took a couple of decades more to get those ideas to sink into practical architecture design and yield the exciting results we see today.

Electroland: Enteractive

image: Electroland

image: Electroland

A luminous field of interactive LED tiles embedded into ground that respond to the presence of visitors and a video display shows the patterns occurring on the building face.

UAP & Ned Kahn: Turbulent Line

image: UAP

Kinetic façade for the car park of Brisbane’s Domestic Terminal.

Jaume Plensa: Crown Fountain

image: flickr user Serge Melki

An interactive work of public art featuring two video sculptures, where two randomly selected faces of various ethnicity and age “converse” with each other.

Peter Cook & Colin Fournier/realities:united: Kunsthaus Graz

image: Harry Schiffer; realities:united

A true pioneer of interactive architecture, the BIX screen matrix facade at Kunsthaus Graz acts as an architectural “enabler” enhancing the building’s communicative possibilities considerably.

 

WOHA Architects & realities:united: Iluma

image: Jan Edler; realities:united

Crystal Mesh is a monitor-façade for the building complex “ILUMA” in Singapore.

FoxLin with NONdesignes & Brand Name Label: Bubbles

image: FoxLin

Bubbles is an adaptable spatial pneumatic installation whose volumes that inflate and deflate in reaction to the visitors coming to the site.

NOX: D-Tower

image: NOX

D-tower is an art piece, commissioned by the city of Doetinchem in the Netherlands, that maps the emotions of the citizens based on a daily questionnaire.

UnitedVisualArtists: Connection

image: UnitedVisualArtists

Connection is a responsive light installation integrated into a pedestrian bridge which creates oscillations of colour and geometry based on human movement.

UnitedVisualArtists: Constellation

image: UnitedVisualArtists

A control panel enables viewers at given times to create their own formations within Constellation – an  installation of 600 mirrored LED tubes.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Blur Building

image: Diller Scofidio + Renfro

The Blur Building by is an atmosphere installation/exhibition pavilion for Swiss Expo 2002. Prior to entering the cloud, each visitor responds to a questionnaire/character profile and receives a “braincoat” (smart raincoat) connected to the cloud’s computer network that later matches them to other visitors with similar characters.