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:

1. 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?
2. 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.)
3. 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.

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