about the project

In the future, walls will breathe and buildings will talk to one another. Construction materials and systems that have been inert for thousands of years will respond in real-time to the dynamic conditions of their surrounding environments and to a larger network of data. Architecture will come to life and will create a Living City.

Living City is a full-scale prototype building skin designed to breathe in response to air quality. David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang have been developing one of the first architecture prototypes to link local responses in a building to a distributed network of sensors throughout the city. The prototype will be exhibited at SoEx, opening and closing its gills in response to information the sensors collect.

With Living City, Benjamin and Yang confront the air as the most public and politicized of spaces in the city – shared by all but invisible, often divisible, and intensely debated and controlled. Using San Francisco as a research lab, they propose an architecture that functions as a public interface to air quality, creating a platform for an ecology of building skins where individual buildings receive, share and respond to data as part of a collective network. In January 2008, the source code for this platform was made available on www.thelivingcity.net.

about The Living

David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang created The Living in 2004. The practice emphasizes open-source research and design, seeking collaboration both within and outside the field of architecture, and viewing each project as part of larger threads of experimentation and construction.

For more information, please visit thelivingnewyork.com.