Kinetic Facades: How Nature of Components Affects the Applications of Different Transformation Strategies

Abstract

In the current trend towards implementation of kinetic elements in buildings facades, a significant role is played by materials characteristics of integrated elements, and its effect on the responsive behavior of kinetic facades towards varying ambient conditions, represented through its motion and transformation strategies. After reviewing a wide range of kinetic facades researches, it was noticed that different research methodologies have been adopted mainly to study the apparent and general characteristics of kinetic facades, to represent an outline of movable facade's configurations and patterns morphology or to study different stimuli types and control strategies. While this paper's main aim is to provide researchers and designers, who are interested in the design and applications of kinetic facades with an overview of the interconnected relation between applied materials and different transformation strategies of kinetic facades.The framework is divided into two parts at which the first part is considered to be a descriptive display of a number of remarkable case studies with different integrated materials and transformation strategies, while the second part is a comparative analysis of facades behavior, followed by a discussion, which proposes elements with different materials characteristics that can be applied to achieve specific scope of movements.