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:

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

Image: kamikazecactus | Flickr

When you design an architectural space, are you concerned with how you might push or pull your occupant while they travel through it? What about when they are standing still? Your occupant’s frame of reference serves to balance them — and you, as the architect, can really play upon this factor.

In essence, you are creating a “shopping experience” for your occupant, and this can apply to more that just retail type architecture. Just as shoppers walk quickly, take their time, stop to browse or stop to rest…your architecture needs to provide good opportunities for your occupants to speed up or slow down.

Like in the painting Four-Way Intersection (above), people can be asked to show different amounts of energy at different points in our designs. Just imagine walking along the sidewalks in the painting — it’s a good thing that there is an intersection providing not only a resting point, but also a chance to regain that frame of balance and reference.

Negotiate Your Occupant’s Efforts

Occupants go through your building spaces and often this takes energy — physically, mentally and even emotionally. So, let me ask you this: What does your design do with their energy? Does it use it efficiently, creatively or do you simply waste it.

Imagine an occupant traveling through a museum design. Will it work better to save the best for last? Or should the important design moments be revealed to them along their journey — in “bite-sized” pieces?

Really, it is all a negotiation, where you must balance their attention, their physical energy and their emotional state.

The IKEA Experience

The store IKEA does an interesting job regarding what I’m talking about. Here is a breakdown of a customer’s experience at IKEA in the United States: Read more