Awareness and Choices are new challenges, good or bad?

Through application of exergy-efficient passive-solar techniques, thermoceptive architecture (TA) can adapt to an audience across gender, age, culture and physiological traits as a mediator between the environmental thermoscape and the skin thermoreception, offering a new level of awareness and choices to occupants.

Such an approach suggests that the physical environment can be energy independent that’s suitably found at the interior scale. Sustainable lifestyle trends shall pose a healthy level of challenge for the today’s dynamic, flexible and adaptive gadget culture. A thermoceptive environment can not only facilitate behaviors, but also inspire new ways of living and acting in everyday circumstances. It is important to recognize that our psychological and physiological perception of space is most influenced by our body’s homeostasis system. Many applications in thermoceptive architecture are not limited to sensing and mechanical movement, and can embrace a wealth of old and new methods inspired by vernacular dwelling and new and emergent material technologies. These techniques should be re-applied to dwellings to achieve energy independence that can mitigate global energy shortage and climate change. While many of these techniques are not technological, some are not even physical, but merely tectonics that inspire behavior change. They do play an important role in influencing the use of space and experience of space. TA that can dynamically adapt to our desires can shape our experience. As TA empowers us with the ability to change building’s thermal envelope, glazing and ventilation system, we are being offered a new level of awareness and choices. Climate is moderated and translated to the inhabitants through the building that acts as a second skin (or a filter) based on either satisfying by achieving a higher level of thermal delight or creating an individualistic behavior based on desires. The key to such process is user engaged and user specific: asked, enticed, directed or challenged. To achieve this, TA must operate on an intuitive and simple level of perception and control.

Thermoscape

What is the opportunity for a new typology of dwelling that addresses the body’s perception or negotiation of its surroundings? How can dwellings reshape one’s living experience and improve thermal satisfaction? How can certain climate correctional functions be incorporated into products for mass commercialization?

Architects of today are aware of that the building sector consumes 50% of global energy and raw materials, and in equal share of the cause for climate change. We must widen our spectrum of capabilities, extending from the visible toward the invisible, from macroscopic toward the microscopic and inorganic toward the organic, most effectively limiting our dependence on energy and shifting towards a passive climate adaptive architectural strategy. It can be done by investigating the sensitive zones closer to the body, at the limit of our skin. The work, titled “Thermoscape” is a synthesis of functionally reinforced energy efficient materials for a retrofit intervention.