Shape Control of Responsive Building Envelopes

The present paper considers shape control of adaptive architectural structures for improvement of structural performance by recognizing changes in their environments and loads, adapting to meet goals, and using past events to improve future performance or maintain serviceability. The general scopes of the paper are to develop a new adaptive kinetic architectural structure, particularly a reconfigurable architectural structure which can transform body shape from planar geometries to hyper-surfaces using different control strategies, i.e. a transformation into more than one or two different shape alternatives. The adaptive structure is a proposal for a responsive building envelope which is an idea of a first level operational framework for present and future investigations towards performance based responsive architectures through a set of responsive typologies. A mock-up concept of a secondary environmental system to a primary structural system joint into a collective behavioral system equipment with an actuator system is presented.