Climate-adaptive facades

Climate-adaptive facades



- Responsive building skins as a coactive approach to integral energy saving design and user comfort in architecture



The PhD-project is looking into the potentials of facades being climate-adaptive.



Facades, which would respond dynamically to the various conditions of the inner and outer environment, would not only optimize the energy performance of the building further, but also enhance the comfort of the user due to daylight conditions, temperature levels and natural ventilation.



Through holistic integrated sustainable design approaches, passive strategies in the building design reduce significantly the energy consumption in early stages. Quite recent researches have shown that relatively simple adaptive sun shading systems could improve the energy saving design strategy furthermore by 5-15%, compared to static systems. More advanced and intelligent systems were predicted to be even better performing.

At the same time new types of climate-adaptive facades have a big potential to contribute to a better user comfort by adapting to exterior and interior conditions, opposite to multi-layered static facades, which are not able to react adequately to the rising user-comfort demands.



In the project process new façade concepts with new combinations of embedded smart materials and new technologies will be developed, built and analysed through research-by-design.



Torsten Sack-Nielsen, October 2013