By Suzanne LaBarre
Architects love saying their buildings have brains. Now, apparently, they’ve got brawn, too. The latest intelligent-building tech from New York architects Decker Yeadon is a mighty, muscle-y structural facade that fights solar heat-gain by flexing its guns.
The Homeostatic Facade System consists of a mess of silvery squiggles – which, to continue the body metaphor here, look a lot like a small intestine – that open and close in response to the sun's rays, effectively regulating temperature throughout a building's interior. The key is something called (steel yourself for the scientific gobbledygook!) a dielectric elastomer actuator that takes energy from the sun, then turns it into an electric charge. The charge then deforms the squiggles, expanding them when it's sunny and contracting them when it's dark. READ MORE >>
