What would happen if a wall could listen?

I'm an architect. For years I designed schools conceived as open, reconfigurable spaces, buildings resolved in modules, places where space had to behave in a certain way, not just look a certain way. Only in hindsight did I realize I was circling the same obsession: spaces that adapt to the people who use them.

The problem was that I could only draw them.

Rhino, Grasshopper, parametric geometry, surfaces resolved panel by panel. Serious work, and work I know how to do. But it all stayed on the screen. I could describe a surface flawlessly and had never made one move.

That's why I came to Fab Lab Barcelona, at IAAC. Not to change careers, but to build with my own hands the thing I could, until then, only represent. Prototype, test, break, fix, start over. In architecture, years pass between an idea and its verification. Here, it took hours.

Five months ago I wrote my first line of code. Since then I've designed and milled my own PCBs, written the firmware that runs on them, and built a kinetic actuator from a stepper motor, a leadscrew, and a touch sensor cut from copper offcuts. Mechanics, electronics, software — all built and repaired by hand, all for the first time.

Then I went looking for the most ordinary thing in front of me. A white wall.

Nothing is more familiar to an architect. Nothing is more inert. Today, what runs inside a wall is a cable and some current. It powers a refrigerator and, if we're generous, a smart speaker sitting on a shelf in front of it. That's the ceiling of what we ask of it.

I want to skip that step.

This is the bet: not a wall you talk to, but a wall that anticipates you. One that understands the room and brings out the space you need before you ask for it.

The first step is called V2f. It's a surface made of independent motorized pins: each one extends, retracts, and senses touch on its own. Together they form what you need, when you need it — a seat, a shelf, a handhold — and let it disappear back into the wall once you no longer need it. Fabric, light, and outlets come next, built into the surface itself.

In ten or twenty years, walls won't just have power outlets. They'll have a brain. Not a screen bolted onto a surface — the surface itself. Closer to programmable matter than to anything else.

I know exactly how much I still don't know. That's been the most useful part of the whole process.

The prototype works. Now it needs the people and the research context to move it forward. I'll be in Boston for FAB26 at the end of July. If any of this resonates with you, get in touch.