Homeostasis

 

Homeostatic architecture is a topic that is becoming increasingly discussed throughout the profession and throughout the academy—a condition of balance both through the envelope and beyond the envelope. Especially in recent decades, the envelope and the enclosure have become more frequently decoupled, whereas before they were considered a single system. This was partly the result of scarcity in many places, where the resources and technology were not sufficiently abundant to create such conditions, and partly because of the perception of how a building envelope could function. Zaera summarizes this condition here:

 

“[The façade] assembles the building’s interior, which it protects, and the external public realm with which it communicates. The surface of the building has a kind of double existence intervening in two disparate worlds: the private inside and public outside.” (Zaera, 78). As the practice of creating performative building enclosures becomes more and more commonplace (in the effort to conserve our carbon, in the effort to create avant-garde public conditions), so too does the effect of these envelopes to shape our spaces of urban character. The temptation exists to create architecture that is wildly irreverent of its surroundings, but careful consideration must be taken to ensure that the envelope acts as an effective filter between the interior and the exterior. This entails strategies that are open and inviting and pay reverence to their surroundings, rather than architecture that prides itself on alien-esque materials and forms.