Adaptive Building Initiative
Company
Profile
Principals
Past Collaborations
Our Network
Why Adaptivity

Our Network



ABI was founded on the premise that a networked business entity helps us reach our goal: to build. As the central hub and technology-holder, ABI provides strategic and creative direction to our project teams of manufacturers, researchers, and construction engineers. This networked approach allows us to do what we do best—invent, design-build—while giving us the ability to provide comprehensive, single-source solutions.


Founding Partners

Hoberman
Hoberman Associates
Hoberman Associates is a multidisciplinary practice that specializes in transformable design—the development of products, structures, and environments that change their size and shape.

Services Include:
  • Concept Design
  • Kinematic and Geometric Rationalization
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Fabrication Oversight
  • Assembly and Testing
  • Installation
  • Control System Design and Implementation
Buro Happold
Buro Happold
Buro Happold is a world-class integrated multidisciplinary company able to offer a complete range of services dealing with the built environment.

Buro Happold engages in the engineering, design, management, and supervision of construction projects around the world. The practice undertakes most aspects of civil and structural engineering, environmental physics, and services engineering as well as specialist consulting services.

Services Include:
  • Structural Engineering
  • MEP Engineering
  • Sustainable Building Design
  • LEED Consultancy
  • Simulation Analysis
  • BIM Modeling
  • Façade Engineering
  • Special Project Engineering
  • Lighting
  • Fire Engineering Design and Risk Assessment



Manufacturing Collaborators



Due to the diversity of our projects, we work with a variety of manufacturers to deliver our adaptive systems. Those include:
A. Zahner Company
A. Zahner Company
For well over 100 years A. Zahner Company has pioneered advances in the architectural metal industry. Zahner's work is now found in and around structures in Europe, Asia and North and South America. Headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri; U.S.A., the company maintains United States production facilities in Missouri and Texas.

Zahner provides solutions for its clients through an integrated organization combining design services, engineering, fabrication and manufacturing, and construction.

Zahner assists ABI in the development and prototyping of new metal shading technologies and provides fabrication and installation services for ABI’s metal systems. Zahner is the exclusive manufacturer of the Tessellate™ system.
Permasteelisa-Gartner Group
Permasteelisa-Gartner Group
Permasteelisa-Gartner Group is the global leader in the design, project management, engineering, manufacturing, and installation of architectural envelopes (curtain walls). With extensive experience and proven know-how, The Group operates in four continents through more than 60 companies located in 27 countries and 20 directly or indirectly owned plants.

Permasteelisa provides glass and curtain wall fabrication and installation for ABI projects.


Affiliated Companies

Wyss Institute
Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University
The Mission of the Wyss Institute is to discover the engineering principles that nature uses to build living things, and to harness these insights to create biologically inspired materials and devices that will revolutionize healthcare and create a more sustainable world. The Institute is developing innovative materials, devices, robots, and disease reprogramming technologies for medicine that emulate how living cells, tissue and organs self organize and naturally regulate themselves. Understanding of how living systems build, recycle, and control is also guiding efforts focused on development of entirely new approaches for constructing buildings, converting energy, controlling manufacturing, and improving our environment.

The Wyss Institute organizes itself around five Enabling Technology Platforms. The Adaptive Architecture & Bioinspired Robotics Platforms will develop biomimetic materials and processes for the construction industry, which will enable buildings to respond and adapt to environmental cues like living organisms.

Early adopters of ABI’s Adaptive Fritting™ system, the Wyss Institute has commissioned two ABI installations—including a dynamic main entry to the Institute’s facilities.

ABI principal Chuck Hoberman is a Visiting Scholar at the Wyss Institute.