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FLARE Creates 'Skin' For Buildings
FLARE is a modular system designed to provide buildings with a non-rigid, interactive and communicative "skin" - unlike those old-fashioned rigid walls you use on your buildings. See the FLARE video below.
(FLARE pneumatic building facade)
As far as I know, FLARE is only a concept system designed by Christopher Bauder and Christian Perstl; however, here is the basic idea.
The FLARE system consists of a number of tiltable metal flake bodies supplemented by individually controllable pneumatic cylinders.FLARE is a modular system to create a dynamic hull for facades or any building or wall surface. Acting like a living skin, it allows a building to express, communicate and interact with its environment.
Each metal flake reflects the bright sky or sunlight when in vertical standby position. When the flake is tilted downwards by a computer controlled pneumatic piston, its face is shaded from the sky light and this way appears as a dark pixel.
The building's appearance as a whole would be controlled by a single computer in charge of surface animation.
As long as we're working with concepts, how about a flexible building with flexible walls? Like J.G. Ballard's psychotropic houses with plastex walls:
It was a beautiful room all right, with opaque plastex walls and white fluo-glass ceiling, but something terrible had happened there. As it responded to me, the ceiling lifting slightly and the walls growing less opaque, reflecting my perspective-seeking eye, I noticed that curious mottled knots were forming, indicating where the room had been strained and healed faultily...
From Dvice.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/12/2008)
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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