Samuel Hustler

Renovating 26 St. John's Road: Encouraging Flexible use through Kinetic Design

Kinetic design is a physical design of a structure or manufactured product that undergoes a motion that is anthropometrically shaped to achieve an alterative use. Kinetic designs (sometimes referred to as dynamic designs) is a platform that has the potential to shape the way buildings are used on a day-to-day basis. Kinetic designs presents opportunities to allow the users of a building to improvise and adapt a space to their own personal needs. The correlation between kinetic designs and space adaptation (referred to as flexible design) is pertinent to the global challenge of reducing energy. 

Renovation is the practice of upgrading an existing building to meet the new demands, regulations, or wants of a community, governments, or building users. A renovation of a building is variable and may be done to reduce energy, improve aesthetics, create more space, change of use, improve air quality, or improve a view out. 

A combination of a renovation using a kinetic design is new and has never been demonstrated before. This relationship found is the foundations to what could be an exploratory path to rethink how we use buildings.