CAN ARCHITECTURE BECOME MORE
SUSTAINABLE THROUGH THE TECHNOLOGICAL
ADVANCEMENTS OF KINETIC AND
RESPONSIVE STRUCTURES AND SKINS ?

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​Traditionally architecture is recognised as enduring, with permanence as the ultimate endeavour. To the exten where architecture is regarded as frozen music, the freezing of an generation, the expression of an age.(fig 1) Buildings tend to be designed as rigid, inert objects which results in an architecture with insubstantial relationships with environmental and social permutations. With the uncertain link between the building and its surrounding  systems, architecture is unable to be fully sustainable. The current architectural model formulates buildings that are unresponsive to their environments; structurally inefficient and wasteful of resources.

However in this modern day, with the rapidly expanding population in cities, increasing social transformations taking place and the ever growing subject of global climate change, our living environment is becoming progressively unpredictable. The theory of buildings being immobile structures, when everything around them is in a continuous state of alteration, is therefore in question.

‘Architecture can no longer continue in its Victorian ideals of existing as unsustainable habitats for humanity, it must evolve, adapt and change’. Armstrong(2009) (1) The following text is an exploration into the recently engaging subject of kinetic and responsive architectures in the built environment. The body of research examines the ramifications of architecture being responsive through
kinetic translations of both structure and the skin (facade) but more importantly the benefits, if any, this has on making our buildings sustainable. The text also investigates the future of responsive architecture, asking whether architecture could one day be a living organism, part of the natural ecology by combining the structure and skin to symbiotically work in harmony.