More than anything, the owners of a new transforming house in Poland wanted constant, direct access to sunlight. They commissioned the local firm KWK Promes to realize their unusual vision, and the result is definitely one of a kind.

“Quadrant House” sits on a grassy suburban plot surrounded by trees. The name comes from both the word referring to the quarters of a circle and a historical instrument used to determine the angle of the sun’s elevation in astronomy. Even without a moving element, the house stands out from its neighbors with its stacked white volumes, blind facades facing the street.

But of course, the star of the show is definitely that kinetic terrace. When it’s flat up against the side of the house, it almost doubles the living space. Moving silently and automatically, the volume swings out a full 90 degrees, allowing more or less sunlight to reach the indoor living room as desired. Sliding glass panels make it possible to open this entire section of the home to the outdoors.

“Clients wanted most simple, sunny and relaxing house, somehow reacting to the movement of the Sun. They also liked our Safe House, its changeability and mechanisms that create relations with the surroundings. The starting point was a regular shape unbuilt site, located in the suburbs among the average single-family housing. We placed a rectangular solid on it, corresponding to the wishes of investors in terms of the functional program.”

“Then we turned the part belonging to the ground floor to get as much privacy as possible from the side of the road. In the ‘cut’ space was located a living room, roofed floor and open to the garden – a similar solution can be found in Living Garden House, where the night zone is on the floor and the day zone becomes part of the garden – the boundaries between architecture and the landscape are blurred.”

Though they hoped for a flat roof, local code requires a gabled shape. The architects found a compromise by angling the gable toward the street-facing facade so that its back edge tapers down toward the yard, giving it a flat appearance from that angle, at least.

And if you’re wondering whether it might actually be dangerous to have a section of your home automatically changing positions according to the movement of the sun across the sky, don’t worry – the architects thought of that. Sensors make sure nothing is in the way of the movable volume, stopping the motion when obstacles are present.

Rippling, unfolding, slithering and glowing like bioluminescent creatures, these kinetic and illuminated works of art are mesmerizing to watch. We can’t help being fascinated by the combination of light and motion, especially when it’s integrated into clothing, responds to our gaze or voices, or is engineered into monumental interactive installations of laser beams for our slack-jawed amusement.

Sound Activated Clothing by Ying Gao

‘Incertitudes’ and ‘(NO)Where (NOW)here’ by fashion designer Ying Gao are two series of unusual reactive garments – the former covered in rippling dressmaker pins, and the latter moving like a living creature while glowing eerily in the dark. The photo luminescent thread works with eye tracking technology to activate movement by the gaze of spectators, while the pins respond to spectators’ voices.

Experimental Kinetic Glass Installations by LASVIT

Czech lighting company LASVIT presents a series of experimental kinetic glass installations during Milan Design Week, creating immersive illuminated environments that move and shift in synchronized rhythms.

La Vie en Rose by Atelier Öi & USM

A company called USM produces a network of industrial components known as USM Haller Systems that offer infinite reuse and reconfiguration possibilities. For Designer’s Saturday 2014 in Switzerland, the company commissioned Atelier Öi to use these parts as a base for a kinetic art installation expressing these possibilities. ‘La Vie en Rose’ is the result.

CL:OC Installation by GROSSE 8

Hanging flurorescent tubes powered by twenty-eight motors hang in the air, constantly rearranging themselves to display the time in digital numbers. Created by German design collective GROSSE 8, the sculpture debuted at Interior Design Week Cologne.

Big Dipper: Helical Kinetic Sculpture by Michael Candy

Looming in the air like some kind of monstrous mechanical spider, BIG DIPPER by Michael Candy is suspended within an old warehouse in India, just waiting to scare the pants off a passerby. It features 18 fluorescent tubes sticking out of a plywood and metal body.

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Living Light 11 Transforming Kinetic Illuminated Art Installations

A giant metallic head splits into segments and rotates in a ‘metamorphosis’ worthy of its subject, author Franz Kafka. All 42 of its layers spin independently, catching the sunlight on their reflective stainless steel edges, magnifying the strange transformation as the head briefly blurs into something more abstract and then comes together again. The 45-ton sculpture was installed in a Prague plaza in 2014, visualizing the inner workings of a psyche the sculptor may identify with, himself. It’s perhaps the tamest and least controversial piece Czech artist David Cerný has ever put out for public consumption.

Entitled ‘K’, the sculpture has a nearly-identical twin called METALMORPHOSIS in Technology Plaza in Charlotte, North Carolina, which even had its own live webcam feed for a while so anyone in the world could watch passersby interact with it at any given moment. The Charlotte version is not based on Kafka, and sits in the center of a fountain, occasionally spitting water. Its mirrored exterior almost makes it seem like an optical illusion in certain lights, like some kind of apparition made of the sky itself.

Born in Prague, David ?erný first gained notoriety in 1991 when he took it upon himself to paint a Soviet tank serving as a war memorial in his home city bright pink. A number of his statues feature grown men peeing, and the literally masturbatory ‘Nation for Itself Forever’ had to be perched on the roof of the National Theater to keep it from being defaced.

Crawling babies with bizarrely punched-in faces scale the Czech Republic’s highest tower and wander blindly around parks, while the nation’s most revered saint, St. Wenceslas, is depicted riding a dead horse. A permanent exhibition at FUTURA gallery Prague features ladders leading up to two white posteriors; climb up and stick your head inside to view a video of two Czech politicians spoon-feeding each other to ‘We Are the Champions.” Czech out a tour of the irreverent sculptor’s works in Prague if you’re ever in the city to see them all.

There’s something alien about the way these metallic structures move, a fluidity that makes them seem as if they’re alive. Each one transforms so completely as it spins, the results almost seem like optical illusions. It’s really all a play of light and shadow on cleverly designed kinetic sculptures, which are engineered to spin effortlessly whether the winds are barely blowing or gusting with extreme force.

Working through many a night in his remote workshop on Orcas Island, Washington, Howe refuses commissioned orders, working only from his personal creative inspiration. Hundreds of his sculptures have sold to private and public collections around the world, including large-scale urban works in several cities.

“Kinetic sculpture resides at the intersection of artistic inspiration and mechanical complexity. The making of one of my nieces relies on creative expression, metal fabrication, and a slow design process in equal parts. It aims to alter one’s experience of time and space when witnessed. It also needs to weather winds of 90mph and still move in a one mile per hour breeze and do so for hundreds of years.”

Will the cities of tomorrow be filled with intelligent kinetic architecture that moves and transforms of its own accord, as if it has a life of its own? The designers of these 16 structures seem to think so, whether they’re making use of ancient pulley-powered systems or engineering remarkably responsive auto-adaptations to change the look of a structure, shield it from the sun, or make it seem like a living creature in a bid to foster deeper connections between humans and architecture.

Adaptable Snow Cone Lifeguard Station

Modeled on a pine cone, this lifeguard post by RAW Design, Ferris + Associates and Curio adapts to weather conditions on Toronto beaches. The white ‘petals’ can move to either offer shade during the hot summer months or to collect snow in the winter for extra insulation. The petals can also be retracted on one side and closed on the other to guard against heavy winds but still let sunshine in. It was fabricated in three weeks and then re-assembled on-site within 6 hours.

Penumbra Adaptive Window Shading System

The Penumbra system by Tyler Short is “designed to offer a kinetic and mechanical solution to a problem that would otherwise be nearly impossible to solve with static architectural components: providing shading across a building facade for both low evening sun and high afternoon sun conditions.” The various kinetic elements of the shade system can shift in different ways to deflect light as needed.

Moving Parts by Olson Kundig Architects

A home with a roof that opens vertically, an art gallery with a hoist-and-pulley facade and a ‘virtually indestructible’ cabin with operable steel panels are among the kinetic projects by Tom Kundig of the firm Olson Kundig. The architect says early exposure to mining, logging and farming industries led to a lifelong fascination with machinery, which he has integrated into all sorts of architectural projects. The idea is to move something large using very little energy, encouraging user participation in the transformation of the space in concert with geometry and physics.

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Architecture Thats Alive 16 Transforming Kinetic Buildings