Variegated Poché

Exploring thermochromic materials as surrogate models for the design integration of surface weathering in architecture

PhD in Architecture

2023

Current environmental and ecological pressures lead architects to reconsider the relationships between the inside and the outside, the permanence of surfaces, and the ageing of buildings. Integrating weathering through design and contextualising it in architectural theory are key components of this paradigm shift. This doctoral dissertation explores thermochromic materials as surrogate models for weathering as a design tool. Thermochromics change colour due to temperature. The research projects investigate the textural relationship between surfaces, substrates, and environments.

The study employs a mixed-methods approach. First, a comprehensive literature review surveys the contemporary and historical concepts of weather, colour, texture, and poché. The correlation between the 19th-century debate on architectural polychromy and anthropogenic pollution acts as a historical case study for today’s relationship between ornament and climate change. Subsequently, the method of thermochromic programming is developed via five design research projects. Consequently, aesthetic chromogenic correlations between natural, long-term weathering and reversible, short-term thermochromic materials are outlined.

The findings demonstrate that thermochromic programming can act as a surrogate model to explore design aspects of augmented weathering in architecture. Modulating thermal mass, topography, and strategic layering of coatings, informed by environmental simulations, can control the thermochromic response. While the results provide a sufficient basis to assess the method’s viability for design, further long-term and large-scale control studies are required.

A series of provocative arguments are formed by critically reflecting on the findings from design, history, and theory. They range from cutaneous terminology like ‘complexion’ for chromogenic phenomena on architectural surfaces to proposing the transplantation of integrated building services from within the poché to the outward-facing side of its tissue.

This research contributes to the field of architecture by providing a historical contextualisation of environmentally induced colour change, the development of material-based design and simulation methods, and the extrapolation of findings to establish novel frameworks for augmenting weathering.

Universität Innsbruck, Faculty of Architecture

Supervisor: Marjan Colletti

Ornate Sustainability

Climate Crisis, Articulations of Weather, and other Shapes of Nature

FACES Journal d’Architecture (77): L’instinct de l’ornement

2020

Crisis is here. With the tides of climate change appear cracks in the foundations of what sustainability in the context of architecture means. Climate change isn’t any longer a speculative concept, that lightly touches the discourse, mainly manifesting in economic aspects of architecture. This ‘classic’ sustainability derived out of pragmatic decisions resulting from the observation that energy prices are rising because of scarcity of fuel. Now, we are confronted with a substantial change in nature, environment, climate, weather et cetera. The previously subtle draught of ecological decline has transformed into an environmental hurricane: an existential threat.
Facing this existential threat, some are turning to alternative models of nature. This shift of perspective - from nature as passive decorum, to nature as an active agent - means we (Architecture) must engage with our environment’s capricious and erratic sides. The built environment can claim back its significant relevance within the negotiation-processes between the natural environment and humanity’s artificial one; an opportunity to design those relationship’s interfaces.
If climate is changing on a magnitude that threatens existence, we have to re-negotiate our relationship to that force. Ornament as an expression has historically often depicted natural motifs. It conveyed meaning in the form of symbols, icons and figures. It has depicted environmental forces as metaphors and characters. Ornament told both stories and histories of nature and our relationship to it. The depiction of the fruits of harvest are as much part of it, as are dynamic fabrics which are indicating motion but are frozen in time. The recently often-stated return of ornament is a tricky matter since digitally generated patterns and tool marks must not be misunderstood as ornament per se. It is therefore more a return of adornment than a return of ornament. Ornament requires meaning, and it adds an additional layer of narrative to any architectural expression. It has its own order and its own canon. This delicate vocabulary has changed minimally throughout the centuries and the topics remained unchanged. Modernism put an end to this, and the idea of material itself as an ornamental performance established an alternative framework to the historic canon. This framework breaks with figures and symbols but introduces natural patterns themselves as a design agent.
Since the early 1990s the ornament-debate continuously gained traction again. New digital design and fabrication tools, combined with an increased interest in highly ornamental historic epochs, led to the emergence of new forms of surface decoration. This included tool marks from cnc-processes, literal depictions of complex organic shapes, intelligent materials, kinetic- sensorial actuation, as well as purely digital media elements. Nonetheless, this plethora of new performativities - although often driven by sophisticated environmental simulations and advanced computation - rarely dealt with the environmental interface between architecture and humans on a communicative level. There are few examples that use ornamental features to convey environmental meaning to the user. Most of the built examples use such surface decorations as intricate methods to structure the otherwise monolithic - both platonic and curvilinear shapes - building volumes and therefore emulate complexity. What if those buildings could speak to us?
They could tell us about both indoor and outdoor climate. They could help us to navigate through increasingly complex and capricious urban microclimates. This new architectural wilderness would embrace the one aspect of nature that it was once supposed to calm: unpredictability. Rather than fighting climate, architecture could tame it; architecture could become our best friend and erratic (environmental) articulation a cross-species translation device. The resulting allostatic ornament acts as a meaningful environmental agent, simultaneously telling histories and generating stories about climate. Consequently, it helps inhabitants to navigate through increasingly heterogeneous and capricious architectural environments.

(manuscript)

Thermochromic Animation

Thermally-informed and colour-changing surface-configurations

eCAADe 2021 Conference, Novi Sad

2021

All factors of thermal comfort are invisible to humans and do not (yet) impact visual navigation in the built environment. Thermochromic materials change their colour relative to temperature. In architecture, their applications as responsive ornaments and as intelligent composite systems are discussed.

Nonetheless, design research on their use together with computational design is scarce. This study investigates thermochromics concerning architectural surfaces. Design and material experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that thermochromic animation can be configured to visualise invisible parameters of thermal comfort. Scale prototypes were fabricated from different materials and coated with thermochromics. They varied in layer number and sub-coatings. The colour change was observed with several instruments. Heat transfer simulations of digital doppelgangers accompanied the physical experiments. The results suggest that this method can be used to configure thermochromic animation. This can be implemented into a procedural design model for porous and multi-layered thermochromic surfaces in the future. In this, digital simulation and material-based design are combined in a method that advances the use of thermochromic materials in the context of digital architectural design.

VIDEO

Elevations

49 Days of Looking onto Nature

URBAN CORPORIS (X): Unexpected

2021

On Monday, the 4th of May 2020, 49 days of lockdown due to the Coronavirus ended in Austria. This meant seven weeks of staying indoors at home. Since the city of Innsbruck is surrounded by mountains, it also meant 49 days of looking at their elevations. This allowed the daily observation of the different weather conditions in such a landscape. The text presents a series of thoughts on quarantines, natures, journeys, and landscapes. They are initiated by 49 photographs of a crossroads in the foreground and a mountainside in the background. The author took them routinely during the lockdown every day. Venturing from this, the text discusses the relationships between place, time, and their corresponding artistic depictions as well as the impact of technology. While the history of Innsbruck’s ‘Riesenrundgemälde’ – a large 19th-century panorama – acts as a local case study, Alexander von Humboldt functions as a historic and global travel companion and guide. This meandering journey discusses the bipolar relationships between indoor/outdoor and immersion/objectivity when depicting landscapes. The alpine scenery – documented through drawings – performs as a climatic recording device and a place of longing. It displays climatic and seasonal progress in a time of social standstill. As a metaphor for this juxtaposition the author’s reading of Humboldt – while being stuck indoors – gives various opportunities to contextualise thoughts within theory and to reflect upon our current time of crisis: both climatic and pandemic. During his years-long journeys, the 19th-century explorer took sketches and notes of distant lands. The 21st-century author instantaneously shares his ‘elevations’ on social media as daily ‘stories.’ Humboldt was among the first to emphasise the role of climate and global interconnectedness. His thoughts are increasingly relevant, in a time where we need to re-evaluate the relationships between the built and the natural environments.

In M. Milocco Borlini, A. Califano (2021), Urban Corporis X - Unexpected, Anteferma: Conegliano (TV), Italy.

Puffy Spaces

Inhabitable Cavities,Climatic Aesthetics and Cutaneous Tectonics

Urban Corporis (2): The City and the Skin

2020

What are the aesthetic, programmatic and performative consequences of a climatically capricious built-environment? An Architecture in which the material fabric itself becomes a place of refuge as a sort of built allostatic apparatus. An architecture where we inhabit its puffy skin.Consequently, surfaces become skins and articulations become complexions: Cutaneous Tectonics. Those performative envelopes generate, modulate and communicate climate and are environmentally performative. Erratic ornament helps users to navigate through space by visualising intensive parameters of what we call thermal comfort: temperature, humidity and turbulence. In this process, Matryoshka-like skins alter flows of air between inside and outside. The program is nestled within and in-between the inflated cavity spaces.In nature shape is cheap but material is expensive. If we want to be closer to nature we have to rethink. We have to create Puffy Spaces.

Comfort Expressions

The dynamic and the static in post-tectonic surface articulation

Building Parts

2019

Robert Natus’ residential and commercial building on Pärnu Road (1936), a triangular corner house on one of the city’s arteries, uses dark brown clinker to articulate the façade in an expressionist manner. The construction method of the building’s facade allowed the architect to exaggerate the formal features of the whole by slightly modulating the orientation of the parts. The resulting geometric ornamentation articulates the building’s skin and amplifies its subdivision and rhythm – giving the otherwise monolithic volume a quasi-organic intricacy. The resulting architecture is expressive on the outside but not expressing what happens inside. Consequently, the articulation remains static and non-programmatic, while the inhabitation of the volume is dynamic and fluctuating. How would it be, if the envelope would express what goes on inside?

(1st paragraph)

Thermochromic Articulations

CFD-Driven Surface Topologies

ACADIA 2019 Conference, Austin TX

2019

The ongoing research presented in this paper lies on the threshold between computational design and digital fabrication with a strong focus on emergent techniques for environmental design. The main hypothesis is, that with an increasing granularity of thermal comfort - observing a trend towards more heterogeneous indoor microclimates – new design challenges arise.

Architectural fabrics will be required to communicate indoor climate conditions to the inhabitants, to maintain high levels of thermal comfort locally but specifically. This research investigates a novel generative design methodology, which links computational fluid dynamics simulations, robotic fabrication and material-inert performances. The resulting environmentally active panels respond to climatic conditions and by this communicate parameters of thermal comfort, such as temperature, airflow, and humidity, to the inhabitants.

This paper presents a digital design workflow, a prototype for a thermochromic panel, and speculates on potential development. Communicating invisible parameters of thermal comfort to users is a crucial requirement when designing large continuous indoor volumes, when blurring the dichotomous duality of inside and outside and when designing highly porous architecture.

Cutaneous Tectonics

Meteorological Continuity

MArch Thesis. The Bartlett School of Architecture

2016

Cutaneous Tectonics investigates the relationship of inside and outside and how the construction of skins can manipulate and blur this duality.

This MArch thesis discusses the architectural definition of skins as a continuous exchange interface. By blurring the boundary condition of the envelope a third – intermediate - space can be created in the in-between. Furthermore the role of transparency and human perception of openness are discussed, as they are an integral part of the visual and sensorial appreciation of indoor climate. The envelope’s spatial dimensions are extended from a thin threshold to a thick inhabitable zone.

The city of Istanbul is introduced as a given outdoor climate condition and data centre, archive, library and greenhouse are set indoor climate zones. Non-mechanical environmental control techniques, such as natural ventilation, thermal mass and material embedded moisture buffering, are utilised to modulate climate conditions according to thermal comfort demands.

A voluminous boundary, shielding a central core region by shell layers, can construct seasonal chambers with migrating functions and occupation patterns. Computer aided fluid dynamics tests were conducted by the author to identify principles of air flows in cavity spaces. The calculated results, analysing those tested matryoshka envelopes, proof that it is possible to design a system of moulting fabrics and still sustaining required standardised air change rates.

This method, inflating the sticky envelope and creating puffy cutaneous cavity layers, is illustrated by several conceptual designs. Environmental field conditions are strategically defined as climates, rather than functions, are allocated. One particular intuitive design is further optimized and the previously generated knowledge is applied. Both the syntax of allocating climates – hence resulting temporary functions - and the idea of epidermal tectonics show great potential for architectural application and seem feasible within a temperate climate zone.

superisor: Hareth Pochee