Hydro Wall by Virginia San Fratello
Shipbuilding Technology Brings Hydro Wall Out of the Computer
By Daniela Morell
When Virginia San Fratello won the 2006 Next Generation® Design Competition for her Hydro Wall, she told us that the biggest challenge to realizing the project would be getting it out of the computer. The complex rolling forms of the wall needed to be high functioning—harvesting rainwater to insulate the building and provide useful gray water—and they needed to look gorgeous.
Last week the first Hydro Wall panel emerged from the electronic box into the material world. At 42-inches tall this prototype is one third the scale of the final building. The mold, created in foam through the precision of rhino CAD and CNC milling, makes a finished piece that is a pristine, fiberglass object that requires no hardware or assembly.
More at: http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3027
Photo: Virginia San Fratello
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The German architect Axel Ritter has been collecting examples of innovative materials for more than a decade, and his book, Smart Materials in Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Design—published by Birkhäuser last December—is a colorful, example-packed, occasionally disorienting catalog of that effort. So what makes a material smart? For Ritter the key considerations are whether it has changeable properties, and whether the changes are repeatable and reversible. It can be as simple as a latex paint that shifts color based on room temperature, or as complex as Ritter’s own proposal for a “polyreactive mechanomembrane” that would alter the shape of a building’s skin based on weather conditions. “Materials are becoming more and more important because architects are now thinking about buildings that are dynamic and can adapt to their surroundings,” Ritter says. But they’re just as important for interior and industrial designers looking for new finishes, adaptive forms, and unusual effects. Here we present a few examples culled from Ritter’s book...
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