When You Think of “Skin”…What’s the First Thing You Think Of?

Have you ever compared building skin to human skin? Well, with new developments like nanotechnology, smart materials and ubiquitous computing the time is ripe to revisit the inner-workings of the human body’s largest organ. After all, there is much to learn by taking a closer look at what lies beneath its surface — particularly as it relates to architecture.

What do you typically think of when you think of “building skin”? Does it primarily function to keep the exterior outside and the interior inside? Or do you use it to bring the outside in within certain parts like windows, ducts and doors? Perhaps you have a more avant-garde way of working with “skin” — using it as part of your architectural language that allows your building to communicate with both its interior and exterior at the same time.

Wherever you may be in your ideas and way of designing building skin, I’m sure that the human skin can help to reinforce and spark new ideas for your architectural designs. You might be surprised to discover that there are many similarities between these two “skins”, and in essence, they are both there to protect and to communicate.

Can Human Skin Inspire Your Designs?

For starters, I want to show you this simple video that clearly shows how the human skin operates physiologically. Now is a good time to watch this sneak peek:

Notice any similarities between what human skin needs to do and Read more

I’m sure you like to stay in nice hotels. That personalized experience where hotel services cater to your needs is always a treat. That’s why today’s convergence technology will be really sprucing up the hotels of tomorrow — sooner than you might think.

As you will learn from the video below, building systems are being created where sensors will measure just about everything from room temperature to mold spores. That information combined with the manually controlled preferences entered by each hotel visitor will yield, as you can imagine, collected data that will be quite overwhelming in volume — particularly because it is first divided into a building’s subsystems.

That’s where convergence comes in.

By converging all of that sensory data into a central “hub”, everything will be interconnected; thus, allowing the building system to make sense of all that data.

As you watch the following video, you will Read more