Description

An investigation into the theory of Material Engagement—proposed by the philosopher Lambros Malafouris at the University of Oxford—led to a rediscovery of sorts of the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht.

With the ascent of robotic architecture in academic discourse, we ought to reconsider how we understand building cognition. The research for this paper revisits the Rietveld Schröder House from 1924 as a precursor of robotic building—with a built-in capacity for change, the building (now a museum) has a highly adaptable space plan that could be continually reconfigured by its occupants. The agency of change is shared between the house and its occupants, most notably Truus Schröder, who lived in the house for 60 years. This paper takes a material engagement approach to explore the cognitive relation between the occupant and the house and speculates how this might be a model for designers of contemporary and future robotic architecture to rethink concepts of autonomy and agency in building cognition.