The Adaptive Solar Design Workshop (ASDW) 2011 was held from March 21-25 2011 as a seminar week option for architecture students at the ETH Zürich.
The workshop was designed to introduce architecture students to the concept of adaptive design through the use basic programming/physical computing. The result of the workshop was the prototyping of an adaptive solar facade component based on concepts derived from Valentino Braitenberg's cognitive machines.
Over the course of five days, working in teams of two, students were introduced to physical computing in the Arduino IDE. Adaptive Solar Facade Components were programmed and physically prototyped in parallel with conceptual integration into a facade design. Students had no previous experience in programming or physical computing.
The reader developed to accompany this workshop can be downloaded here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9860960/ASDW_Reader.pdf
Workshop participants: Lars Abersold, Julien Bellot, Giulia Bosia, Hao Li, Eva Luginbühl & Fabian Reimer.
Team A (Lars Abersold & Giulia Bosia) developed a multi layered facade design consisting of multiple component types which perform various functions including: shading, solar collection, & light reflection into the interior space.
Team B (Eva Luginbühl & Fabian Reimer) developed a multi-funtional component which integrated solar tracking capacity with a layered/dynamic system allowing for myriad facade states.
Team C (Jullien Bellot & Hao Li) integrated a umbrella like collapsable component into their facade system allowing various performance needs to be addressed including user preference for open and closed states.
The video below shows the working prototypes developed by the student teams during the workshop.
