Location: Princeton, United States.

Architect: The Living.

The interdisciplinary research facility on robotics and sensors is an open-source building that proposes an alternative to fixed and iconic architecture. The building is designed to evolve over time, with components and systems that can be swapped and upgraded. It is sustainable and features zero-energy radiant heating and passive cooling with no air conditioning. The building is the first in the US to have a five-ton gantry crane made of timber and uses salvaged scaffolding boards from NYC construction for its facade. The facade reveals natural variation rather than suppressing it with a lowest-common-denominator approach, offering a new perspective on buildings as a temporary formation of materials, energy, and labor. The building suggests a new hybrid design approach that is high-tech and low-tech, familiar and new, functional and aesthetic, digital and biological.

Photo credit: Michael Moran.