A building can be regarded as a static object. This is the image we get when we see an Egyptian pyramid lasting for thousands of years. However, in the age of immediate information, when our living environments keep on changing instantly, it is more useful to consider buildings not as passive objects, but as entities that continuously perform and evolve.

Just like a living creature grows in the womb of its mother to eventually become an organism capable of existing on its own, buildings become virtually formed by their designers during design processes. Eventually they get born, become materialized, or in other words they get built. However, that initial design process which formed them up to that stage doesn’t end there. Buildings keep on changing. They keep on mutating and re-adapting to their environment; they grow mature, and eventually deteriorate, get old and die.

This loose analogy to living forms can become very direct when we look at how buildings are being designed by the most avant-garde, cutting edge contemporary design offices and what new design and manufacturing techniques and methods are now becoming available with the latest advancements in digital technologies.

The paper brings together different fields of research to present a new kind of architectural design model. A model which emerges not only from new techniques and design methods, but, most importantly, which becomes possible due to a new way of looking at architecture, seeing it as a continuous, constantly evolving process.

Author’s presented work includes substantial contributions to the development of the Protospace system, an initiative of prof. Kas Oosterhuis at Technical University in Delft, the Netherlands, as well as work on prototypes realised together with the Hyperbody group.

Protospace is a vehicle for transdisciplinary research, education and design in form of a virtually augmented transaction space. It allows working on different software platforms simultaneously, allowing real-time collaboration between different specialists in the design team. Out of previously distributed design data and its processing, Protospace forms one distributed, real-time network which not only makes the entire design process much more efficient, but it allows for incomparable improvement of reached design quality, allowing designers to freely explore endless design variations.

This system can be used to approach the entire design and production process in a radically new way and to develop new design tools, capable of treating designs as constituting of a very high number of interconnected, autonomous design components and taking advantage of emerging in this way complex adaptive systems, as well as giving possibilities of applying intelligent design techniques such as genetic algorithms, L-systems or using advanced generative geometries.

Such designs can then be seamlessly materialized in ways that facilitate their further evolution. Several concepts have been tested and prototyped on 1:1 scale in various case projects. New materials, became sensing and actuating organs of buildings and digital information processing worked as their neural system. This allows to radically enhance the adaptive and performative qualities of designed buildings. Presented work fully illustrates this design paradigm shift.