Faculty of Architecture and Planning

This book documents a series of immersive and responsive architectural environments created by Philip Beesley and collaborators between 1995 and 2006. A series of essays by Christine Macy, Robert Pepperell, Charles Stankievech, Michael Stacey are included, together with detailed drawings and photography documenting the installations and sculptures.

These compositions have tended to concentrate on vital, seething qualities built up from intensive repetition of miniature parts. The work tends to be dominated by practical technology while at the same time poetic cadences are latent: blood, soil. The large-scale field structures offerbodily immersion and wide-flung dispersal of perception.The textiles in these installations have recently taken the form of interlinking matrices of mechanical components and arrays of sensors and actuators that respond to occupants moving within the environment. Lightweight lattice and geodesic organizations form a structural core,employing digitally fabricated lightweight scaffolds that contain distributed networks of sensors and actuators. The structures are designed at multiple scales including custom components, intermediate tessellations composed of component arrays, and general structural systems. The current work focuses on integrating control systems with decentralized responsive intelligence. The work is based on gradual development moving toward applied architectural environments that include manufactured fi ltering and shading systems.