PHILIP BEESLEY

 

MRAIC OAA RCA, practicing visual artist, architect, and Professor in Architecture at the University of Waterloo and

 

Professor of Digital Design and Architecture & Urbanism at the European Graduate School.

 

 

He serves as the Director for the Living Architecture Systems Group, and as Director for Riverside Architectural Press.

 

His Toronto-based practice Philip Beesley Architect Inc. operates in partnership with Rolf Seifert and the

 

Waterloo-based Adaptive Systems Group, and in numerous other collaborations. The studio’s methods incorporate

 

industrial design, digital prototyping, and mechatronics engineering. Beesley frequently collaborates with artists,

 

scientists and engineers. Recent projects include a series of hybrid fabrics developed with Atelier Iris van Herpen,

 

curiosity-based machine learning environments developed with Rob Gorbet and Dana Kulic of the Adaptive Systems

 

Group, and synthetic metabolisms developed with Rachel Armstrong of the University of Newcastle. His most recent

 

collaboration with Iris Van Herpen has translated a shared sensibility for subtle materials, electricity, and chemistry into

 

a collection of highly complex and diverse textile and haute couture collections.

 

 

His research focuses on responsive and distributed architectural environments and interactive systems, flexible

 

lightweight structures integrating kinetic functions, microprocessing, sensor and actuator systems, with particular focus

 

on digital fabrication methods and sheet-material derivations. Beesley has authored and edited sixteen books and

 

proceedings, and has appeared on the cover of Artificial Life (MIT), LEONARDO and AD journals. Features include

 

national CBC news, Vogue, WIRED, and a series of TED talks. His work was selected to represent Canada at the 2010

 

Venice Biennale for Architecture, and has received distinctions including the Prix de Rome, VIDA 11.0, FEIDAD, Azure

 

AZ, and Architizer A+.

 

 

New Sentient Architecture    

 

Can architecture come alive? Could future buildings think, and care? Researchers from the Living Architecture Systems

 

Group are exploring these questions by designing new prototypes of experimental architecture. The Living Architecture

 

collaboration includes architects, engineers and industrial designers from the University of Waterloo in Canada, with

 

groups of researchers in North America and Europe. Design methods from the Living Architecture group are now being

 

used to train emerging generations of architects and engineers, providing them with the skills they need to work with

 

complex interconnected sustainable environments.

 

 

These extremely lightweight, flexible structures are interwoven with miniature computers controlling mechanisms that

 

can sense, react and learn from viewers. The work is organized the same as a coral reef or a swarm of insects, with

 

large numbers of many individual parts. These systems are connected together, passing signals back and forth so that

 

the entire environment works as a whole. Interconnected vessels contain a liquid synthetic biology that can absorb and

 

exchange materials from the atmosphere. Digitally fabricated components make meshwork scaffolds with mechanical

 

fronds that gently stir the air. Cricket-like acoustic mechanisms make constantly-shifting choruses of whisper sounds,

 

responding to movement of viewers. Working together, these systems suggest new ways of building adaptive, sensitive

 

buildings of the future.

 

 

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