BA3: Kas Oosterhuis interactive environment at Utrecht

The architecture of Kas Oosterhuis (ONL Architects), suggests Interactive Architecture (which he abbreviates to iA). Oosterhuis defines iA as an art of building 'bi-directional relationships' through the interaction of input, processor and output.

Parametric design processes allow architects to insert specific and variable environmental data and gain diversity results. Oosterhuis describes iA as, creating a "equal input (listening), process (thinking), and output (talking) of people as well as the built components of architecture." Through the efficiencies of CAM technologies, designers are now able to produce customised responses with comparable economies. Oosterhuis calls this approach 'non-standard architecture' (NSA), that are unique and produce manufacturing processes of ‘mass-customization’.

NSA provokes the disadvantage of mass production era to obtain a better response to individual variation. Each building component is uniquely produced and configured to the assembly method by the use of computerized documentation. The built environment is able to diversify in a more fluid or a natural-like way. Oosterhuis writes, “Repetition is no longer beautiful. In NSA the unique characteristics/ uniqueness/ unicity/ unity of the components is felt as natural, logical and beautiful”

The project is a combination between varied uses of public hardscape and a commercial space. A showroom that submerge in between a 1.5 kilometer strip of a sound barrier in the city of Utrecht, Netherlands. The showroom ‘Hassing Cockpit’ displays luxurious cars with a 5000 square meter building is placed along the side of A2 highway containing large continuous floors of display space sitting on top of workshops and garages underneath. The design concept derived from the studies of car, boat and airplane spline and morphed with a flow continuous 'dike' form with seemingly no start or end points. Sections of the dike change as a result of the different functional scenarios, from straight erected to concave. The acoustic barrier smoothly curves around a showroom space and turns again into convex glass wall. Finally it ends with the flip to a horizontal plane.

Each part of the structures, joinery and its envelopes were documented with a single computer model, linked with output fabrication documentation processes. He calls it as a ‘file2factory’ in order to directly describe all the parts built in a pre-fabricated manner ready for production. The efficiency comes from a means of design and documentation linked (and at one) with the means of describing fabrication.