"Everything keeps moving, nothing stays the same.": On becoming with context in the work of SANAA

In terms of building new architecture, there are ways of letting time and change play a significant role; for instance when contextual factors get to have direct impact on the formal expression of a building or directly animate parts of a building. One of the earliest examples is Toyo Ito’s “Tower of Winds”, which interactively dissolves from daytime solid form to light and rhythms at night. Recently this tendency has found expressions spanning from interactive projections in public space, as for instance in Rafael Lozano-Hemmers “Relational Architecture”, to the slowly growing and changing facades of Jean Nouvel’s “Musée du quai Branly”. SANAA presently carries such interest in time, change and relationality further in an architecture that relates to its exterior and to its users and subjects, not only visually and perceptually, but by expressively living the same reality and explicitly letting the experience of living-with, of being part of the same reality, be central to the work. This article suggests that SANAAs work explicits an architectural becoming with context.