Exhibition 'Reactive Architecture' at Te Papa

Reactive Architecture focuses on environmentally responsive design strategies as an interaction between landscape, people, architecture and digital information. `Reacting` in this case means a responsive behavior to changing conditions such as weather, climate, program, frequency of use or topography.

Reactive Architecture is focussed on efficiency relating to usage of space, material, construction, energy, time and pleasure. The projects take strategies and processes in nature as an impulse for architectural development. In form of six interactive installations the exhibition showcases innovative concepts of reactive architecture in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The projects exhibited include WideShut, a prototype of a light sensitive façade system; ShippingLandscape, CitySail a haptic digital model of a hybrid building-machine, which uses an internal vertical garden structure to generate a composite growing environment as a recreational living area.

Arch[id] is an interactive installation experimenting with the modulation of light and Carrera a slot car race track connected to exercise bicycles. The exhibition will also showcase the PHaZE project, an international research initiative by led by Uwe Rieger and Jobst Engel, which aims to design and build New Zealand’s first Passive House and Zero Energy unit.

Further contributors are: XTH-berlin in cooperation with Duncan Lewis, Luka Hinse [MIG], Barrington Gohns, Fraser Horton, Julian Legg and Rayneil Singh. The show is curated by Uwe Rieger, Architect and Deputy Head Architecture at the School of Architecture and Planning at The University of Auckland.