Brief Overview of Climate Responsive Facades & Its Kinetic Applications

Facade systems have recently been transformed from simple passive elements to more advanced and complex active systems that are able to act in an adaptive manner and in response to the surrounding environment through changing buildings facades behaviour, in terms of spatial configurations or characteristics of its external skin. R esponsive facades can improve building’s energy efficiency through improving buildings energy savings by their capability to change their behaviour and/or characteristics through exploiting stimulus-responsive materials and intelligent control systems that can make a significant and valuable contribution to the success of the buildings system as a whole. This paper intends to display a brief overview of the existing different climate responsive facades strategies through displaying a number of different environmental responsive facades behaviours as well as goals that can be achieved by the applications of such responsive facades. Based on the analysis of the illustrated case studies considered in this paper, responsive behaviour of kinetic facades is categorized under two main categories in response to two main types of stimuli that usually buildings are subjected to which are solar radiation and natural air current. Each one of these types is categorized into other sub categories which vary according to a number of different factors such as the design strategy, desired function or applied technology. the applications of kinetic solar responsive facades in this research is divided into three main types, which are responding through architectonic building movement, transformable shading systems and integrated kinetic shading systems with PV cells. While natural air current and wind driven kinetic responsive facades are divided in to two main types, which are air current responsive facades and integrated air current responsive facades with wind energy collectors. Adaptive architecture generally and responsive facades strategies specifically with its wide range of applications is considered as an emergent and significant research topic, based on its capability of reducing buildings energy consumption rates drastically as well as improving the indoor living environments.