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Smart Building Skins: Lecture-01 Environmental Responsive Technologies Architecture Department CECOS University Peshawar

This document discusses several examples of responsive building skins and facades that adapt to environmental conditions. It describes an algae facade in Hamburg that generates renewable energy, a pair of towers in Abu Dhabi with a secondary sun screen that opens and closes in response to temperature, and a hospital in Mexico City cloaked in tiles that "eat smog" by using titanium dioxide to scrub pollutants from the air. It also mentions a temporary installation made of a thermobimetal mesh that curls in reaction to heat.

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Muhammad Tariq
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95 views10 pages

Smart Building Skins: Lecture-01 Environmental Responsive Technologies Architecture Department CECOS University Peshawar

This document discusses several examples of responsive building skins and facades that adapt to environmental conditions. It describes an algae facade in Hamburg that generates renewable energy, a pair of towers in Abu Dhabi with a secondary sun screen that opens and closes in response to temperature, and a hospital in Mexico City cloaked in tiles that "eat smog" by using titanium dioxide to scrub pollutants from the air. It also mentions a temporary installation made of a thermobimetal mesh that curls in reaction to heat.

Uploaded by

Muhammad Tariq
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Smart building skins

Lecture-01
Environmental Responsive Technologies
Architecture Department
CECOS University Peshawar

Ar. M.Tariq
MS Env. Design (AIOU cont.)
Responsive architecture
• Responsive architectures are those that measure actual
environmental conditions (via sensors) to enable buildings to
adapt their form, shape, color or character responsively (via
actuators).
An Energy-Producing Algae Facade
• The world's first building to be powered entirely by algae is being
piloted in Hamburg, Germany, by engineering firm Arup.
• The "bio-adaptive facade", which Arup says is the first of its kind, uses
live microalgae growing in glass louvres to generate renewable energy
and provide shade at the same time.
• Installed in the BIQ building as part of the International Building
Exhibition, the algae are continuously supplied with liquid nutrients
and carbon dioxide via a water circuit running through the facade.
• When they are ready to be harvested they are transferred as a thick
pulp to the technical room inside the building and fermented in a
biogas plant.
A Light-Responsive Facade That "Breathes"
• This pair of Abu Dhabi towers are sheathed in a thin skin of glass—
fashionable, but not ideal for the desert climate.
• So the architects at Aedas designed a special, secondary sun screen
that deflects some of the glare without permanently blocking the
views. Thanks to a series of faceted fiberglass rosettes—based on
traditional Islamic mashrabiya—which open and close in response to
the temperature of the facade.
• “At night they will all fold, so they will all close, so you’ll see more of
the facade,"
A Facade That Eats Smog
• Back in 2011, the chemical company Alcoa unveiled a remarkable
technology that could clean the air around it.
• The material contained titanium dioxide, which effectively "scrubbed"
the air of toxins by releasing spongy free radicals that could eliminate
pollutants.
• The stuff has made appearances on streets, clothing, and architecture
since then—most recently, on the sun screen of a new Mexico City
hospital, the Torre de Especialidades.
• The hospital is cloaked in a 300-foot-long skin of Prosolve370e tiles,
developed by a German firm called Elegant Embellishments
• The technology is based on the same process: As air filters around the
sponge-shaped structures, UV-light-activated free radicals destroy any
existing pollutants, leaving the air cleaner for the patients inside.
A Metal Mesh That Reacts to Heat
• Bloom, a temporary installation by USC architecture professor Doris
Kim Sung, isn't technically a facade. But it's not long before a similar
technique is used in buildings.
• Sung's research deals with biomimetics, or how architecture can
mimic the human body. This sun shade was made with
thermobimetal—a material that's actually a laminate of two different
metals, each with its own thermal expansion coefficient.
• That means that each side reacts differently to sunlight, expanding
and contracting at different rates—causing tension between the two
surfaces, and ultimately, a curling effect.

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