The present social and environmental challenges, the impact of climate change andthe pandemic, revealed the urgency and the opportunity to rethink urban designthrough its renewed spaces and temporalities. The pandemic offered a ‘natural exper-iment’ to explore and develop new perspectives, making public spaces more resilient.Contributing towards a rethink of these spaces, the present paper explores adaptivearchitecture with responsive technologies and their capability of shaping public spacesto constitute a conversation piece with the surrounding environment. This approachcombines and reflects different disciplinary fields: architecture, civic interaction and ur-ban design. The exploration works around a speculative design case – produced aspart of broader research at the Amsterdam University of Applied Science in collabora-tion with the Master in Digital Design.