Pneusystems

Pneusystems explores the potential for formal, material and operational principles found in biological cellular pneumatic systems to be translated into models for lightweight adaptive building envelopes that operate through low energy and non-mechanically actuated systems. While early pioneering work examining the pneu as a biological model for architectural translation was primarily limited to the development of large inflatable and tensile building assemblies, new computational tools and advances in the material science of membranes recommend a re-visitation of specific biological instances of pneus as models for translation to adaptive building envelope prototypes. The formal, material and operational possibilities for pneus to function as deep building skins imbued with environmental response, interaction and intelligence is proposed through the study of several specific models from biology, translated into active architectural geometries. The capabilities explored are: variable aperture control, variable air exchange, variable thermal control and binary actuation.