14 DAY TRIAL // A team of researchers from the University of Greenwich's School of Architecture & Construction, are working on the development of a new kind of facing for buildings, that could gather water and even generate energy.
Professor Neil Spiller, an architect and head of the University of Greenwich's School of Architecture & Construction said that he has “been interested in the impact of new technologies on architecture since the early 1990s.
“That was the start of cyberspace and virtual reality generally, and people started to talk about biotechnology.”
The Professor has a long history in futuristic architecture, and currently, he working with researchers to develop protocell cladding for buildings.
Architecture is an ever-evolving science, always trying new and better materials, as well as construction methods, in an attempt to create buildings that provide better ways of living.
This new research, carried out by teams from Greenwich, the University of Southern Denmark, University of Glasgow and University College London, could be very successful in hot climates, where its benefits would be incommensurable.
It could lead to houses that gather water and harvest sunlight to collect biofuels – a real ecological treasure.
“We are at the stage where we are developing submissions on developing protocell cladding,” Professor Spiller said.
“We are trying to get some cladding that used protocell technology that will allow a building facade to respond in real time to fluctuations in its micro-climate around it.”
The experiments the researchers have conducted so far were inside a lab, and now, the next step is to scale them up to the “building facade scale of a panel, however big that is.
“There is a variety of things that we may use such as bioluminescent bacteria.
“We’ll use slide mold in one experiment, in another we’ll use the actual protocells.
“With protocells there is no DNA, no genetics, they are really just bubbles in water, so there is no ethical problem there.”
This material could also have very large economic and ecological benefits.
Spiller said that this is “a technology that is not constrained by the normal production procurement and economics of the building industry that we have in the First World.
“The big drive in the construction industry in the next growth period is going to revolve all around sustainability and ecological planning.”
Professor Spiller co-edited an influential edition of the Architectural Design journal on architecture and cyberspace, before becoming interested in nanotechnology.
In 2004, while he was at University College London, he formed a research group, called AVATAR – Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research.