"A dwelling can be standardised to meet the needs of men whose lives are standardised," wrote Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier as he presented his pavilion called the L'Esprit Nouveau, or the New Spirit, at Paris in 1925. His idea was to extend the logic of the assembly line to the design of the spaces we live in. In doing so, however, Le Corbusier and his followers forgot a fundamental ingredient: people. Starting from the paradigm of standardised living, many inhospitable Modernist buildings were designed throughout the course of the 20th century.
Today's context has changed. Almost everything – from cars to trainers to school curricula – can be tailored. In 2018, the same will be true in architecture, with the arrival of personalised indoor-temperature control.
The way we heat or cool our buildings is done in a standardised fashion, regardless of the presence of people and their preferences. In other words, there's a missing connection between space usage and energy consumption. The result is that a staggering amount of energy is wasted on heating empty offices, homes and partially occupied buildings. A similar issue holds true for lighting.
How can we re-establish a closer match between occupancy and energy usage? Over the past few years, we have been investigating this challenge both at the MIT SENSEable City Lab and at Carlo Ratti Associati, by looking at how digital technologies – from sensors to AI – can help us make our built environment more responsive. If people have been following heat since the Stone Age, what if we could make the heat follow individuals instead?
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This was the idea behind Local Warming, an installation we presented at Rem Koolhaas's 2014 Venice Biennale. The project used motion-tracking sensors to generate the desired climate - through collimated beams of infrared radiations - directly around people. More recently, we had the chance to translate these experiments into the real world. We were asked by the Agnelli Foundation, an Italian nonprofit founded by the Fiat family, to renovate its historical venue in Turin. Now we can use the insights we gained in these projects to roll out the technology to other, real-world applications.
For Agnelli, we equipped the building with digital sensors that monitored many variables – such as temperature, light levels and the rooms' occupancy status – and we matched this information with data on the spaces' occupancy. When a person enters a building and sets their preferences in term of temperature or lighting, the building-management system recognises them, and automatically responds by activating the heating, cooling and lighting system accordingly. Each person can change their preferences via a smartphone app at any time, so that a thermal bubble is generated, potentially following them as they move through the building.
What we aimed to show at the Agnelli Foundation is that by pursuing a tailor-made, non-standardised approach we can achieve not only better comfort levels for building users, but also a substantial reduction in energy consumptions: between 25 per cent and 40 per cent, according to some simulations. In 2018, we can build on this further. And by designing climates we can achieve something even more. We can start developing a new paradigm in design, to substitute Le Corbusier's inflexible, standardised approach. Architecture can finally turn into a third skin - an endlessly reconfigurable space able to adapt to human needs, rather than the other way around.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
