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The last decades have been marked by a growing concern over scarcity of resources caused by the rapid industrialization of emerging economies as well as by the high material consumption at a global scale. These changing environmental conditions have inevitably created new challenges and demands for mediation of the interaction between the natural and the human-made environments. In response to these challenges, designers are currently moving away from conventional top-down design, towards a nature-inspired approach in search of the underlying principles of morphogenesis and materialization inherent to biological entities. Inscribed in this approach, this paper proposes an innovative design-to-fabrication workflow for the conception of nature-inspired load-responsive skin systems which integrates the use of computational tools, Additive Manufacturing, and material experiments with full-scale prototypes. The design phase employs custom algorithms to determine an optimal material distribution for free-form architectural shapes, given a specific loading condition. Through fabrication tests at different scales, the viability of a production system based on Fused Deposition Modelling is demonstrated. Subsequently, the realization of a final prototype of a load-responsive cellular envelope cladded with Fiber-Glass Reinforced Plastic is presented. Opportunities and current limitations of the approach and the emerging architectural system are critically discussed towards future developments.

The development of adaptive architectural envelopes is one of the goals of researchers that aim to improve the energy performance of buildings. Traditional devices often have drawbacks linked to the complexity of the kinetic systems used, as the mechanical systems for guaranteeing proper operation are complex and expensive (e.g., hinges). Adaptive envelopes require energy for driving the mechanical components and management systems. Thus, it is useful for such adaptive elements to be self-sufficient, generating the energy necessary for their functioning. This study presents a prototype of a lightweight and stand-alone component for dynamic envelopes, characterized by a flexible composite material integrated with high-efficiency photovoltaic cells called the Solar Lightweight Intelligent Component for Envelopes (SLICE). The management and control of the SLICE is based on the Arduino platform. This paper describes the multidisciplinary design process that led to the realization of the current prototypes, the laboratory test phases, as well as the results of the preliminary experiments carried out under real environmental conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]