Environmentally Responsive Building Skins

The intent of the course is to comprehensively encompass building envelope design issues as pertaining to both its internal and external environments. The building skin must be in tune with its immediate external environment, address its constraints and absorb the opportunities whilst creating a comfortable internal environment for the building occupant.The proposed course will be two-fold; a series of lectures and a small design project. The lecture series shall include varying topics related to building skin as response to its external environment and internal occupant comfort needs including case studies. The series will address the topics of fundamental principles of building physics, filtration of natural elements through the façade including light, sound, etc., accepted human comfort standards and deviations, design responses for varying environmental elements and the process thereof and understanding available tools to assist the analysis and design process.The design exercise will be research based and allow the students to identify a problem specific to a given geographical location and its climate and propose a modular/component design solution with in-depth analysis to validate its performance. The design exercise shall be performed in groups of 3 to 4 students.The course will be evaluated based on student seminar participation and the final submission of research/design project which should demonstrate the student\’s knowledge of the subject and evidence of a thorough research process.Students for this course must have basic proficiency in using environmental analysis tools for either solar, daylighting, thermal or wind.