Smart Architecture. Adaptive (transparent) components for the improvement of building envelope performance

The growing awareness about issues related to the concept of environmental sustainability as well as towards energy consumption reduction has quickly led to a revolution in building process and technologies. In this framework, the attention is focused on building envelope materials and components as major responsible for energy efficiency and consumption’s reduction. So, research main intentions are to understand how new advanced materials and technologies could become key drivers for innovative building design concepts thanks to the possibilities they offer in defining new architectural languages; after the collection of information about a selection of case studies of adaptive building envelope, the research aims at investigate the transparent building components – as the ones with the greater impact on the whole building performance – to understand the way in which such innovative technologies could offer new possibilities to implement windows’ performance, allowing a global implementation of the whole system. The analysed technologies will include smart materials, ICTs, solar reflective technologies and shading system for enhancing daylight control, to reach for the definition of a system that can optimize energy savings during all seasons. The final goal of the research is to propose strategical addresses for building application of systems and components with adaptive features as guidelines to solve a still existing issue in the design of dynamic building envelope systems, achieving improvements in their overall performances with a consequent adaptive behaviour in relation to the changeability of external conditions and in synergy with the data-transmission to systems.