New Technologies for Adaptive Architecture Santina Di Salvo Abstract Since the 1980s, the bioclimatic architecture has had the historical merit of having raised public and experts’ awareness on the importance of designing buildings with the purpose of solving the problem of energy saving. Nowadays, in the light of the most recent energy strategies policies, in force on an international and European scale, codified in EC Directive 31/2010 concerning the implementation of the Nearly Zer-Energy Buildings (NZEB), (Deru et al. 2006), the need for a new approach to redevelopment that focuses on environmental, climate and energy objectives with inno- vative technological solutions emerges, aimed at opti- mizing the passive bioclimatic behaviour of a building. In the world of architecture, from the beginning of the 1990s to today, it has been possible to witness the appearance of structures able to adapt their form, shape, colour or character responsively (via actuators), reflecting the environmental conditions around them. These skills, which redescribe the architectural relationship with the space and the surrounding environment, fall within the scope of what is commonly called “Responsive Environ- ment”. In this new scenario, we explore the possibilities offered by the latest technologies in support of traditional architecture. This article, in an attempt to interpret the culture of our time, aims to advance in the field of “Responsive Environment” through the creation of an “intelligent”, dynamic and adaptive architecture which redefines the common perception of the environment. Keywords Adaptive envelope Á Sustainability Á Bioarchitecture Á Ef ficiency Á Innovative technology 1 The Challenge of Sustainable Design The originality of this contribution consists in attributing importance to new objects of investigation still neglected in traditional studies and reflecting on the new possibilities offered by new technologies. Why are the quality and sus- tainability of buildings so important? First of all, we spend about 90% of our time in the whole building and 30% of them do not provide adequate living comfort; then, buildings consume around 40% of the total energy we use; finally, it is possible to build healthy and comfortable buildings with a very low impact on the environment (Jäger 2017). The article highlights that the challenge of sustainable design is to optimize at best natural resources, which are variable and inconstant, and to create sensitive buildings with variable behaviour, in dynamic energy balance with climate and environmental control: organisms capable of self-regulation and mutation, in terms of offered performance levels and external configuration. Recent community rules on the energy performance of buildings impose increasingly strin- gent measures for the control of energy consumption, which oblige us to rethink the formal and technical-constructive choices integrated into the project of new buildings and the recovery of existing one, having as goals the maintenance of a certain degree of comfort, an increased feeling of well-being, health and quality of use of the inhabitants (Santiago Fink 2011). Through the examples discussed, we highlight how focusing on adaptive architecture is possible, by integrating traditional architecture with innovative technologies, according to a new holistic approach to the project, that goes beyond the mere adjustment of energy expenditure and environmental performance, and includes many other aspects, such as architectural and construction quality assurance, flexibility and adaptability of space, safety, life cycle costs and social repercussions (Marvaldi et al. 2016). This is because energy ef ficiency is only a piece of a more complex mosaic, which should evaluate and monitor the S. Di Salvo (&) Department of Architecture, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy e-mail: santina.disalvo@unipa.it © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. Bougdah et al. (eds.), Urban and Transit Planning, Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17308-1_41 457