Frontiers of Adaptive Design, Synthetic Biology and Growing Skins for Ephemeral Hybrid Structures

The history of membranes is one of adaptation, from the development in living organisms to man-made versions, with a great variety of uses in temporary design: clothing, building, packaging, etc. Being versatile and simple to integrate, membranes have a strong sustainability potential, through an essential use of material resources and multifunctional design, representing one of the purest cases where “design follows function.” The introduction of new engineered materials and techniques, combined with a growing interest for Nature-inspired technologies are progressively merging man-made artifacts and biological processes with a high potential for innovation. This chapter introduces, through a number of examples, the broad variety of hybrid membranes in the contest of experimental Design, Art and Architecture, categorized following two different stages of biology-inspired approach with the aim of identifying potential developments. Biomimicry, is founded on the adoption of practices from nature in architecture though imitation: solutions are observed on a morphological, structural or procedural level and copied to design everything from nanoscale materials to building technologies. Synthetic biology relies on hybrid procedures mixing natural and synthetic materials and processes

Captazione solare

Lemma che descrive l'insieme dei processi e dei sistemi che permettono l’assorbimento di energia termica da radiazione solare per un uso diretto o indiretto in un edificio - ISBN:ISSN 2284-00IX - visibile su: Wikitecnica.com/author/battisti-alessandr

Assessment and mitigation strategies to counteract overheating in urban historical areas in Rome

As urban overheating is increasing, there is a strong public interest towards mitigation strategies to enhance comfortable urban spaces, for their role in supporting urban metabolism and social life. The study presents an assessment of the existing thermal comfort and usage of San Silvestro Square in Rome during the summer, and performs the simulation of cooling strategies scenarios, to understand their mitigation potential for renovation projects. The first stage concerns a field analysis of the thermal and radiative environment on the 1st and 2nd of August 2014, including meteorological measurements and unobtrusive observations, to understand how people experience and respond to extreme microclimate conditions. In the second stage, the research proposes scenario simulations on the same day to examine the influence of cool colored materials, trees and vegetative surfaces on thermal comfort. The thermal comfort assessment was based on Physiologically Equivalent Temperature (PET), whereas microclimatic simulations were conducted with CFD calculations (ENVImet v.4.3.1). The first stage shows a strong relationship between lower PET values and attendance rate, depending on daily shading patterns. The second stage shows a relevant improvement of thermal comfort, with PET values of 12 °C comparing to the no-intervention scenario, associated with a combination of cool materials and trees

Now's the time. Tendency should be reversed: nature vs architecture

The aim of the research work presented in this paper is to establish guide lines in order to reconstruct building complex which are illegal or which somehow are endangered. This could be done by considering the principles of environmental sustainability and those of environmental friendly consistency. These took active part in this delicate matter, which resembles a surgery operation and underline the need to establish rules and requalification processes as well as the retrofitting of spaces between