Brief overview of climate responsive facades and its kinetic applications

Abstract EN

Facade systems have recently been transformed from simple passive elements tomore advanced and complex active systems that are able to act in an adaptive mannerand in response to the surrounding environment through changing buildings facadesbehaviour, in terms of spatial configurations or characteristics of its external skin.

Responsive facades can improve building's energy efficiency through improvingbuildings energy savings by their capability to change their behaviour and/orcharacteristics through exploiting stimulus-responsive materials and intelligentcontrol systems that can make a significant and valuable contribution to the success ofthe buildings system as a whole.

This paper intends to display a brief overview of the existing different climateresponsive facades strategies through displaying a number of different environmentalresponsive facades behaviours as well as goals that can be achieved by theapplications of such responsive facades.

Based on the analysis of the illustrated casestudies considered in this paper, responsive behaviour of kinetic facades iscategorized under two main categories in response to two main types of stimuli thatusually buildings are subjected to which are solar radiationand natural air current.

Each one of these types is categorized into other sub categories which vary accordingto a number of different factors such as the design strategy, desired function orapplied technology.

the applications of kinetic solar responsive facades in thisresearch is divided into three main types, which are responding through architectonicbuilding movement, transformable shading systems and integrated kinetic shadingsystems with PV cells.

While natural air current and wind driven kinetic responsivefacades are divided in to two main types, which are air current responsive facades andintegrated air current responsive facades with wind energy collectors.

Adaptive architecture generally and responsive facades strategies specifically withits wide range of applications is considered as an emergent and significant researchtopic, based on its capability of reducing buildings energy consumption ratesdrastically as well as improving the indoor living environments.