An international symposium takes place on 26-27 April at the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary.

We have seen over the past decade an increasing interest in the capacity of built spaces to respond dynamically to changes in external and internal environments and to different patterns of use. The principal idea is that two-way relationships could be established between the buildings and the environment and users. Changes in the environment (or users) would affect the configuration of built spaces and vice versa. The result is an architecture that self-adjusts – an architecture that is adaptive, interactive, reflexive, responsive.

By adding sensors, actuators and controllers to various systems, buildings are in a way becoming large scale robots. This symposium will go beyond this current fascination with mechatronics and will explore what change means in architecture and how it is manifested: buildings weather, programs change, envelopes adapt, interiors are reconfigured, systems replaced. It will explore the kinds of changes that buildings should undergo and the scale and speed at which they occur. It will examine which changes are necessary, useful, desirable, possible…

Additional information you can find here.