Cameline Bolbroe, 'Mapping the intangible: Framing and Operationalizing Adaptivity in Architectural Design' (Higher Seminar, Feb 5)

In recent years technological advancements in architecture has led to a possibility to design architecture with non-static qualities. The possibility to design with non-static qualities affords the architectural professional with a whole new opportunity space to explore. At the same time, this opportunity space challenges both the principles governing the design of architecture as well as the agency of and the methods at hand for the architectural professional, since architecture is traditionally contained in a paradigm of permanence.

In an effort to explore and advance the notion of adaptive architecture, being one of several domains of non-static architecture, I frame a shift in attention from the architectural object alone to an attention towards the act of inhabitation. Consequently the act of inhabitation is a process of negotiation between the architectural object, the inhabitant and the environment. In order to facilitate a methodological grounding of adaptivity and as a response to meet the challenges of designing with adaptivity in architecture, I propose a particular method specifically tailored for adaptive architectural design. The method, relational prototyping, is founded in the idea of inhabitation as an act. Relational prototyping adapts techniques from performance to construct a full-scale prototyping genre, which equips and capacitates the architectural professional with a means to explore and operationalize adaptive qualities of architecture.

CAMELINE BOLBROE
Cameline Bolbroe is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Adaptive Environments Research Group at the IT University of Copenhagen. With a background in architectural design and digital aesthetics, within research as well as a practitioner, she conducts practice-based research within the field of adaptive architecture. Using future prospects of technology provisioned architecture as a speculative driver, Cameline pursues questions in relation to the development of architectures with a capacity to modify to change in a relationship between architecture, the inhabitant and the environment. Of her primary interest is how adaptivity influences the built environment and our spatial experiences alike, as well as new architectural design practices emerging from an adaptive approach to architecture.

Cameline has an educational background in architectural design from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and in digital aesthetics from The IT University of Copenhagen as well as she has been working as a private contractor, in the intersection between arts and architecture, for several years.

For more info, visit:  www.adaptive.itu.dk