Living Envelopes for Buildings – A Historic Parallel

Abstract

According to Daniel Libeskind ‘Architecture is not based on concrete and steel and the elements of the soil. It’s based on wonder.’ A building is a sculpture at a territorial scale. Integrated in the environment it may bring added value to the landscape (as in the case of the Sydney Opera House that became not only the symbol of the city but also of Australia). In a dry definition, a building is a plant: it shelters scheduled activities and interacts with the natural and built environment in a manner that led to comparisons with the medical world: we have building pathology, sick buildings, building skin, breathing structures etc. From the architects’ point of view, a building is about space. From the engineers’ point of view, a building is about performances. From the users’ point of view, a building is about well-being (which is an immaterial notion). The building envelope has always been somewhere between material and immaterial: a combination of fashion and technology. In the past decades it has been analysed according to the essential requirements and classified in types and categories. As the necessity of preserving the planets’ resources increases, the need to impose new requirements on the buildings increases as well as, according to modern researches, the most important energy consumers are the buildings and their users. In this context, the building envelope gains some new responsibilities and roles:- to save energy, to produce and (when appropriate) to harvest energy;- to diminish the type and amount of urban pollutants and to restore the quality of the microclimate of the environmentStrange as it may seem, current trends in architecture turn to perennial principles of design that have always been taken into consideration in the traditional architecture or throughout history. Living envelope systems are in fashion, as the benefits of plants spin from providing better air quality by decreasing heat island effects to providing food in urban farms and from saving energy in buildings to preserving the natural environment. Buildings designed with living envelopes are millenary solutions. The paper focuses on making a parallel between contemporary architectural approaches and historic approaches regarding the building envelope.