Philip Beesley's Toronto-based practice PBAI is an interdisciplinary design firm that combines public buildings with exhibition design, stage and lighting projects. Beesley's work is widely cited in the rapidly expanding technology of responsive architecture, and his studio's methods incorporate industrial design, digital prototyping, and mechatronics engineering. He will present recent work by the Living Architecture group that offers a new set of design paradigms.

The presentation will suggest that conception of buildings can move from classical ideas of a static world of closed boundaries toward the expanded physiology and dynamic form of a metabolism. Working with artists, engineers and scientists, Beesley’s Living Architecture research group combines the crafts of lightweight textile structures and mechanisms, dense arrays of distributed computer controls with machine learning, and early systems of artificial-life chemistry.

New installations within the collaboration feature dense reticulated grottos with breathing, reactive, near-living qualities. Recent constructions have included a wide range of scales, from intimate details rendered in clothing for couture, to canopies and construction systems for urban spaces. Details from the emerging work show a preoccupation with intimate human touch interacting with extremely lightweight materials diffusing into the surrounding air. Thin layers of voided hovering filters are tuned for delicate kinetic and chemical responses that cohere in the form of expanded physiologies, beckoning and sharing space with viewers.