A Responsive Façade System

Need for energy conservation and sustainable development in buildings draws great attention of many architects and architectural researchers. Design aimed to minimize destructive effects on environment has become one of the designers’ concerns. To this end, façade is of great importance as building’s skin in sustainable building design. Although many designers care about the beauty of façade, impacts of façade on the energy consumption of building are undeniable. Façade as the building skin not only should provide an appropriate view but also preserve the building from severe weather conditions along with having proper interactions with the surrounding environment. One of the new approaches in architecture able to help designers reach to these objectives is responsive architecture. Changing environment is analyzed by sensors which enable shape, form, color, and other building’s properties to adapt themselves to the environmental changing. This type of technology has caused variations in design. In the present study, in addition to a brief introduction to responsive façade to accomplish developmental objectives, energy preservation, reduction of emission intensity based on required extent, and so forth, façade responsive design is conducted through Grasshopper plugin in Rhinoceros software. Furthermore, present work firstly investigates the importance of responsiveness then explores the problem statement and finally explains the project.

Keywords:

Responsive architecture , sustainable building design , energy preservation , responsive façade