Adaptive decorative building skin

Abstract

Traditional decorative ornaments were commonly used on the building skin of traditional architecture. Nowadays in urban areas, those ornaments become less popular for they are considered oldfashioned and due to the lack of technical function that matches with the modern building designs. Based on those issue, this paper proposed a type of building skin that aimed to revive a new expression of traditional decorative elements by applying digital design tools and technology as well as having an adaptive function. Traditional decorative ornaments merged in an adaptive skin that used traditional patterns as a controller of the effect of environmental changes in a building could provide a new expression of the use of traditional ornaments on a building in accordance with the times. Most of the adaptive building skin used kinetic techniques in order to make its formation and pattern transformable. This paper proposed a parametric-cam mechanism to transform the pattern of traditional ornament using preprogrammed analysis data of environmental changes to parametrically drive the number of rotation phase and length of nose that generated the shape of the cams. In conclusion, this paper has developed a prototypical tool that facilitates the new approach to kinetic decorative ornaments on building skin.