Living City

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. During their fellowship term, David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang developed one of the first architecture prototypes to link local responses in a building to a distributed network of sensors throughout the city. They created software to collect and share data from wireless sensor networks, allowing any participant building to talk to others and take action in response. The first conversation took place between the Empire State Building and Van Alen Institute. The prototype was exhibited at the Institute’s public gallery and, through an air quality sensor network on the facade of Van Alen Institute's building, communicated wirelessly with a sensor network deployed on the facade of the Empire State Building, opening and closing its gills in response to information the sensors collected.

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 New York City 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 early 2008, Benjamin and Yang will publish their software so that others can build off of it to create new networked response systems.

For more information about Living City, visit www.thelivingcity.net.

Exhibition: December 11, 2007 - January 18, 2008
Van Alen Institute, 30 West 22nd Street, 6th Floor

Opening: December 11, 2007, 6:30-8:30pm
Presentation by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang
with DeeDee Gordon and Mark Hansen: In Conversation

Living City is additionally supported by the Graham Foundation and by the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University.