Environments. Actions of Adaptation in Architecture

The 1960s Environments emerged as artistic practices to question our modern relationship to objects perceived as isolated entities and as products within a market logic; to context, initiative, authority, ethics, and aesthetics. As open, process-based situations, they should allow for a praxis of reappraising demarcations, roles, and concepts in the art, social, and natural world. Environments had an early, but only short influence. To this day, art and architecture continue to be widely shaped by objectifying and reifying processes, even though the limits of the systems they belong to have become obvious in confrontation with a global climate crisis.In this article, the authors re-connect to the earlier artistic and architectural practices with the aim to develop a conceptual approach to adaptive architecture. This architecture is conceived as part of open “Environments", able to dynamically react with their users to social and environmental challenges, to mediate and reframe the relations between subjects, objects, and the natural world.