| |
Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:
Have you ever thought about a building skin being used to broadcast real-time information? Perhaps it doesn’t have to be a direct broadcast, but rather an interpretation of information — a sort of architectural information visualization. The image above is simply to get you thinking about the exterior of your building skin, as an element which can pull or push data. Such data can be conveyed to occupants within or to building visitors in the exterior, or even perhaps to a surrounding community that can see or hear this broadcast. If you could do this for your project, what type of information would you want to broadcast? What type of information would you want to translate through your design? And how would you hope that it impacts your occupants and surrounding culture?
To Apply This Strategy, Ask Yourself:
| First, ask yourself what the difference is between such broadcasted data and advertisement — which you would typically see on a building exterior. How does it serve occupants and communities better? And what can it do that advertisments or typical signage cannot? Does it take advantage of real-time updates? Does it pull from the internet, other built environments, or even from within its own walls? Does it collect data from a meaningful source? And does it inform, entertain, acknowledge, or inspire your occupants? The key is to push technology, as harmonized with architectural design, to be something of value — to exist for more than simply because it can exist, and to enhance the very occupant experience which your environment helps to shape. Make technology more than just an “add-on”. Make it a meaningful and valuable quality that is fused into your building. |
|---|
| |
Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:
Be sure to think more holistically about what your building skin can accomplish. The building skin in the photo above helps to absorb traffic noise, and is also said to change perceptually as a visitor moves around the building. (1) So, what perceptual advantages does the design of your building skin give your occupants? While temperature control or amazing interior to exterior vistas are wonderful occupant benefits, how else can you use your building skin to shape your occupants’ experiences for the better?
Image Description Citation: (1) http://www.flickr.com/photos/7539060@N06/4819922319/
To Apply This Strategy, Ask Yourself:
| As you design your building’s skin, think of more than just a few exterior vantage spots from which your occupants will view their building. Also, think beyond materiality that defines how each material in a skin’s assembly works independently from one another. Instead, be sure to also challenge your design by delving into the language of its skin — including how all of the materials work together with each other and their context. Understand how your building skin moves, protects, invites, dampens, filters, self-repairs, conceals, highlights, or even forshadows. The skin of your building has a perceptual effect, both for occupants in the interior and exterior of your building. Use what it is capable of doing to your full advantage. |
|---|
| |
Image: treehouse1977 | Flickr
Within architectural design, the notion of “building surface” and “building skin” are increasing in importance and are, thus, becoming elements which you as an architect can leverage to bring greater sensitivity to your built environments.
In fact, research is underway to develop new electric skins that are so pressure sensitive to touch that they are actually rivaling, and surpassing, human skin’s sensitivity to touch. And by using such pressure-sensitive electric skin in architecture, more meaningful ways for occupants to interact are likely to arise, where building installations become increasingly in tune with not only occupants’ needs, but also with the dynamic fluctuations of the environment which surrounds the building. Hence, building skin could serve as a bridge, sensing the touch “frequencies” between both occupants and the surrounding environment.
What Can a Building Do with Skin Data?
As more sensitive skin and installations become part of a larger architectural dynamic system, it brings with it greater ability to sense even the most subtle fluctuations in the environment, like wind, water or debris. And how might a building benefit by increasing its level of sensitivity to pressure in this manner? Well, it would move Read more
| |
Image: Curbed SF | Flickr
Unleashing Necessity and Your Ingenuity
The need to build green skins that are able to harness energy gives architects incentive to find new ways to use and guide emerging technologies. Essentially, it is necessity coupled with ingenuity that can often spark the best design innovation.
As an architect, it will help you to think about building skin and all of its possibilities in totally new and fresh ways. Instead of using building skin to “shield” or “expose” building occupants to the external environment, think of how building skin can act as a live filter that “flexes” its own boundaries in dynamic ways. As an exercise to get you thinking along these lines try asking yourself the following three questions to get you started:
- On Selectivity: How can I connect my occupant with nature in completely new ways? Instead of thinking of skin as a barrier, how can I think of it as a dynamic filter — how could I separate different light, air quality or sound properties so the exterior can enhance interior spaces? How many exterior/interior “hybrids” can I think of?
- On Preconceptions: What qualities of nature do I presently take for granted as a designer? Can I “capture” a particular aspect of nature that is usually “invisible”? How can I “feed” my occupants through a building’skin to let them “touch” it in new ways? (For instance, a clever positioning and use of smart glass.)
- On Transience: What could my building do if my building skin could change in real-time? Could “windows” move and flex in new ways? Could they magnify or minimize certain qualities of nature? What new “between-states” could I create to bridge interior and exterior environments?
With the advent and evolution of nanotechnology, there will be many new developments for architectural buildings — particularly when it comes to building skins. Already there are newfound ideas on the drawing boards showing how certain nanotechnology integrations could work.
Harnessing the Power of Sun and Wind
One example of this is seen in the Concept Tower designed by Agustin Otegui. Within this tower’s skin, Otegui uses Nano Vent-Skin (NVS) as a way to extract energy from both the sun and wind. Using a system of “sensors, organic photovoltaics and micro-wind turbines”, the Concept Tower’s skin would be able to self repair through a self assembly process.
In the following images you can see, conceptually, how this design would work: Read more
| |
The following video is by Urban Screen, a company that claims to “put architecture on stage”. They basically design large-scale projections for urban surfaces.
You will notice how the building facade in this video becomes dynamic and its skin seems to “breathe” — even if it is only an illusion.
Please note: If you are not able to play the video, make sure to click this article’s title above so you can view this video from the original Sensing Architecture page.
LAYERS OF FLATNESS
In some ways I think that the experience of this installation is very different on video than it would have been in person. I do; however, like the way the projection is scaled to “play” with the existing buildings design elements (windows and such).
Seeing a video like this is thought provoking in that it makes one aware of a state we call Read more
| |
In this video you will see an innovation called SuperCilla skin. This is an interactive and haptic building skin that serves as an energy source due to the movement of its small members. As you watch, imagine how the uses of this skin could vary greatly depending on the scale of the object around which this skin is wrapped. A small object with SuperCilla skin could move itself across the floor, while an object like a building could use this skin for an array of aesthetic, functional and sustainable needs. Also, it is interesting to imagine how our haptic interactions might affect such a design installation.
VIDEO REVIEW
SuperCilla Skin is described as an “array of magnetically actuated transducers that can record and playback physical motion”. This type of skin can be wrapped around any shaped object. It can be applied to many scales such as to a large building. In addition, SuperCilla skin is also a Read more
