Adaptive building skin structures

The concept of adaptive and morphing structures has gained considerable attention in the recent years in many fields of engineering. In civil engineering very few practical applications are however reported to date. Non-conventional structural concepts like deployable, inflatable and morphing structures may indeed provide innovative solutions to some of the problems that the construction industry is being called to face. To give some examples, the search for low-energy consumption or even energy-harvesting green buildings are amongst such problems. The paper first presents a review of the above problems and technologies, which calls into evidence how the solution to these problems is requiring a multidisciplinary approach, involving the integration of architectural and engineering disciplines. The discussion continues with the presentation of a possible application of two adaptive and dynamically morphing structures which are proposed for the realization of an acoustic envelope. The core of the two applications is the use of a novel optimisation process which leads the search for optimal solutions by means of an evolutionary technique while the compatibility of the resulting configurations of the adaptive envelope is ensured by the Virtual Force Density Method