reinventing materiality with augmented skins

Performative architecture understood as responsive systems demands a departure from traditional notion of material towards an augmented composite.
The responsive environments usually consists of a skin able to react to different conditions, both from surroundings and from virtual environment. This type of environment might be called an augmented one, because it is a physical one, upgraded with a system capable of computation, which is a direct connection to virtual. The skin therefore needs to consist of resizable structure and actuators.
One of the examples of augmented skin design might be a HybGrid, a project by Sylvia Felipe and Jordi Truco, done at Emergent Technologies Program at Architectural Association. HybGrid is “a layered grid-shell with uniform grid layout made from elastic members becomes globally defined through local manipulations of actuators that regulate the distance between the members of the layered lattices”.
The Hybgrid uses the logic of “elastic deformation”. This kind of deformation is present in natural structures. It enables the adaptivity potential while the strength of the structure, driven by the continuity of the material remains in place. The logic is obtained by composing elastic fiber-composites with actuators. The fiber-composites are arranged into two-layer, prefabricated strips, which contain a certain amount of inertia. The actuators, placed between the layers, provide connection of the skin to the especially dedicated software. Therefore they augment the skin by providing constant possibility for reshaping it.
The form-finding process of HybGrid is a continuous in 4d one, like other examples that we describe underneath. What make it quite specific is that it is a fully predesigned one and that the interaction with the user can only occur via the interface. There are no sensors that can trigger the actuators to perform a certain action, like in a Muscle NSA for example, where the interaction is possible in two ways: not only via software interface but also via performance in the physical.

The Aegis Hyposurface is an art/architecture tool that connecting information systems with the form to produce dynamically surfaces. Aegis is perhaps the world's first such dynamic screen. The Junction would be the first permanent site for a Hyposurface that is already in development for exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris from December to March 2003.This project has a potential to translate into form different medium- a digital input (keyboard, movement sensor) can give any psyhical output (a wave) In this Aegis has potential beyond that of a screen to being a fully 'architectural' (social, physical) interface, where activity (sound, movement, light etc) translates into form. It’s a curtain of steel mesh mounted on computer-controlled pistons. Through Aegis digital systems are extended into social space creating the potential for an architecture of reciprocity, reacting to and with the activity of people. One finds oneself, and others, within the architecture. The project was designed to show events that are happening inside the theater. The collaborative effort between dECOi, RMIT’s Burry, and leading researchers in solid geometry and electronics.
A user interface will permit the operating system to be used directly by The Junction. This will allow The Junction to use the Hyposurface in a variety of different ways - as an Internet-activated screen linked to a web cam, as a sound-board to the nightclub events, as a drawing-board for aspiring graphicists.
The Aegis Hyposurface is a huge sketchpad ,it is a 3-dimensional absorptive medium that allows all manner of graphic and sketching. The artists of the new medium will be the physical bodies of The Junction mingling with the distant minds of the Internet.

Monika Szawioła, Akriti Sood, Michał Piasecki