In recent years, architecture has increasingly embraced adaptability, flexibility, and responsiveness as core design principles. This evolution reflects a shift from traditional notions of static, permanent structures to dynamic environments that can adjust to changing needs and conditions. Central to this transformation is the concept of "soft architecture", which leverages pliable materials and innovative systems to create spaces that are functional, sustainable, and user-centric. Soft architecture takes shape through membranes that breathe, façades that move, structures that inflate or fold, and surfaces that bend rather than break. It involves designing for transformation — not only in how a building performs environmentally, but also in how it can accommodate shifting functions, user interactions, or temporary occupations. This approach to building challenges traditional notions of durability and control, proposing instead a more responsive and open-ended architecture. It reflects a growing awareness that buildings, like the societies they serve, must be able to evolve.
A New Vocabulary of Softness
Architecture has traditionally drawn its strength from firmness — from the weight of stone, the inertia of concrete, and the permanence of brick. Yet as the built environment is called to respond to more volatile climatic, social, and technological conditions, this association between architecture and rigidity is being challenged. In its place, a new vocabulary is emerging — one rooted in adaptability, reversibility, and lightness. "Softness" in this context refers less to a material property than to a conceptual shift in the way buildings relate to time, use, and ecology.
Soft architecture resists fixity. It is conceived not as a finished object, but as a living system that evolves. It embraces materials that are flexible, lightweight, and responsive, and favors assembly techniques that allow for disassembly, transformation, and reuse. This resonates with broader discussions around the circular economy and lifecycle design, which advocate for buildings that can adapt to changing functions and minimize their environmental impact from construction through to deconstruction.
Thinking in soft terms means thinking in stages. Materials are no longer fixed elements locked into static configurations, but dynamic agents whose lifespans extend beyond a single program or site. Soft architecture encourages techniques such as dry assembly, reversible joints, and low-impact foundations, enabling disassembly and reuse without compromising material integrity. This approach supports a circular model of construction where buildings can be not only inhabited but dismantled, adapted, and reassembled across time.
In parallel, softness also expresses a cultural attitude — one that privileges openness over control, interaction over prescription, and care over dominance. It reflects a broader shift in architecture from authority to agency, from objects to systems, from permanence to possibility. This orientation is not new. In the 1960s and 70s, architects like Cedric Price envisioned buildings as fluid frameworks rather than finished forms. His Fun Palace project, often described as a "laboratory of fun", proposed an architecture of incomplete components, adaptable platforms, and user-driven change. Though never built, it anticipated a design ethos that embraces indeterminacy and participation.
This sensibility finds continuity in the work of Lacaton & Vassal, whose housing transformations embody the "right to change" not as a slogan but as a spatial principle. In projects such as the Cité du Grand Parc in Bordeaux, they chose to retain and extend existing buildings rather than demolish them. The result is an architecture that accommodates life rather than dictates it, softening the boundary between public and private, formal and informal, finished and ongoing. Softness here is not only about material but about attitude: an economy of means paired with generosity of use.
These perspectives converge in a broader understanding of softness, not as fragility or passivity, but as a form of spatial intelligence attuned to transformation. It is an architecture that makes room: for difference, for temporality, for negotiation. In doing so, it repositions the architect not as a master builder but as a choreographer of conditions, creating the possibility for architecture to adapt, breathe, and evolve with those who inhabit it.
Material Intelligence and Structural Lightness
Soft architecture is deeply material. Its emergence is tied to the development of new composites, membranes, and responsive systems that allow buildings to become lighter, more efficient, and more expressive. Materials like ETFE — a fluoropolymer with high tensile strength and remarkable transparency — have opened new possibilities for creating inflated envelopes that are both structurally sound and visually delicate. In buildings like the Eden Project by Grimshaw or the Beijing National Aquatics Center, ETFE cushions create voluminous yet lightweight enclosures that regulate light and heat with minimal material use.
These materials operate not in isolation, but in concert with new fabrication and simulation tools. Parametric design, robotic manufacturing, and digital weaving techniques enable architects to precisely calibrate the behavior of materials, creating structures that perform with high environmental and spatial efficiency. Projects like the ICD/ITKE Research Pavilions at the University of Stuttgart exemplify this integration: using bio-inspired logic and fiber composites, the pavilion rethinks how structures can be both strong and flexible, engineered and grown.
Equally important are projects that recover familiar materials — wood, textiles, rope — and reimagine them through contemporary processes. WoodSkin, a material system developed by MammaFotogramma in Milan, is one such example. It combines thin layers of plywood with textile mesh to create flexible panels that can adapt to curved surfaces. Often used in interior design, WoodSkin questions the boundary between surface and structure, form and material. It invites architects to think of skins not as passive cladding, but as systems capable of motion and adaptation.
The Soft House in Hamburg takes this approach even further. Designed by Kennedy & Violich Architecture, the project combines flexible solar textiles with a robust timber structure to produce a house that reacts to the sun's movement and produces its energy. The solar curtains, activated by sensors, modulate light, harvest energy, and offer privacy, becoming, in effect, a programmable façade. Here, softness is not only formal, but also behavioral — an active interface between building and climate.
Inflatable architecture deserves attention not only for its playfulness but for its efficiency. Pneumatic structures, often dismissed as temporary, are deeply instructive in how they rethink form, logistics, and economy. DOSIS, Kengo Kuma, and Raumlabor have explored inflatables as tools for spatial occupation and social activation. Because they require minimal foundation, can be deployed rapidly, and embody minimal material weight, inflatables offer a model for low-impact, high-mobility design. In them, the concept of "building" expands beyond permanence and enters the realm of event, occupation, and transition.
While softness often evokes newness, it can also be found in traditional building cultures that favor reversible construction, material efficiency, and climate sensitivity. Techniques such as weaving, shading, or lightweight timber framing, when revisited through digital tools or hybrid systems, offer ways to bridge vernacular wisdom with contemporary performance. In this sense, soft architecture is not just a product of innovation, but a rediscovery of knowledge that was always adaptive, cyclical, and resource-aware. The work of Anna Heringer, for instance, blends earth construction with textile processes and local labor, resulting in architecture that is both soft in expression and grounded in community-based sustainability.
Adaptability and Engagement
Beyond materiality, softness in architecture reveals itself in how buildings engage with their users and their context. At its core, soft architecture embraces adaptability — not just in the sense of functional flexibility, but as a more open-ended condition of spatial and environmental responsiveness. This means designing structures that do not dictate fixed uses, but instead accommodate transformation, appropriation, and evolution over time.
The logic of adaptability challenges the modernist ideal of the building as a complete and resolved object. Instead, it invites architects to think of their projects as frameworks — structures that support different programs, rhythms, and behaviors. This approach is particularly evident in spaces designed for collective use, such as cultural centers, exhibition spaces, or temporary installations, where the ability to reconfigure interiors or expand enclosures according to changing needs is a core design feature.
One example is the MPavilion program in Melbourne, where architects are invited to design temporary pavilions that host a variety of events over a single season. These structures — including designs by Sean Godsell, Amanda Levete, and Studio Mumbai — are often conceived as lightweight, open, and reversible, integrating kinetic elements or modular assemblies that allow for reconfiguration. In this context, softness becomes an operational quality — a way of enabling interaction between architecture, people, and program.
On a smaller scale, soft architecture also manifests in systems that respond in real-time to external conditions. Adaptive façades, retractable shading devices, breathable membranes, and kinetic installations enable buildings to self-regulate temperature, daylight, and airflow. This enhances environmental performance but deepens the user's experience of space as something alive and in motion. Projects like the Al Bahr Towers in Abu Dhabi, with their responsive mashrabiya system, or Bloom by Doris Sung — a façade that curls open and closes with temperature changes — make this logic visible and tactile.
Ultimately, soft architecture fosters a more participatory relationship between users and space. It invites occupation, reinterpretation, and play. By eschewing rigid boundaries and prescriptive layouts, it aligns with broader shifts in architecture toward more inclusive, adaptable, and co-created environments.
Rethinking Architectural Temporality
If softness invites adaptability, it also requires a rethinking of architectural time. For much of the twentieth century, durability was synonymous with quality. Buildings were expected to last — and to look the same — for decades, if not centuries. But as climate emergencies accelerate and urban lifecycles shorten, architecture is being called to operate on different timescales. In this context, softness suggests a new kind of temporality: one that accepts change, prioritizes reversibility, and embraces impermanence as a design condition.
Temporary architecture offers valuable insights here. Pavilions, mobile structures, and emergency shelters are often dismissed as peripheral to the discipline, yet they are laboratories for testing new materials, construction techniques, and spatial logics. They show how buildings can be erected quickly, with minimal impact, and removed or repurposed without waste. In doing so, they foreground notions of portability, modularity, and reuse — all central to a circular understanding of building lifecycles.
The Serpentine Pavilion in London is a recurring case in point. Each year, a new pavilion is designed to be erected for a short season and then relocated. Projects by architects such as SANAA, Bjarke Ingels, or Junya Ishigami explore experimental structures using fabric, polycarbonate, or mesh — challenging the material conventions of what constitutes a public space. These pavilions often use dry assembly techniques, minimizing the need for concrete or glue, and enabling dismantling with minimal waste. In this way, softness becomes a temporal strategy — a way of responding to the ephemerality of events, climates, or collective needs.
In this redefinition of time, architecture becomes less about the monument and more about the moment — about how a structure performs across different durations, whether seasonal, cyclical, or transient. It calls for a design practice that is not only technically agile but ethically attuned to the rhythms of life, resource use, and urban change.
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topics: Rethinking Materials: Techniques, Applications and Lifecycle, proudly presented by Sto.
Sto sponsors this topic to emphasize the importance of digitized materials in architectural design. Its high-quality PBR-files, as demonstrated in a case study with the London-based architecture firm You+Pea, provide architects with precise tools for confident decision-making from concept to execution. This approach bridges virtual and physical realms, supporting more accurate and efficient design.
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