Designed at Formula
Proposed as a Face-Lift to one of New York City’s high rises, F.A.T. (Fluent Adipose Tectonic) re-evaluates how a façade can be understood and manifest itself within today’s given current technological and cultural landscape. The project is an opportunity to program a multi-purpose façade that utilizes the idea of a thickened surface to stratify material and performance. The end result is an inflated skin that challenges the conventional role of the façade, which in most cases, is to keep the exterior forces out. In this case those undesirable forces are absorbed, transformed and then redirected into and throughout the building in some form of energy. This becomes possible through the negotiation of design and function in conjunction with the use of advanced environmental/tectonic analysis software and cutting edge fabrication hardware. These hard and soft tools used in concert allow for new ways of understanding the built environment and they become indispensable tools for envisioning and developing hybrid architectural systems of enclosure like the F.A.T. (face lift). In this case, we have aggressively pursued the use of desktop simulation as the formula to push energy modeling, solar modeling, day-lighing modeling, and CFD modeling (computational fluid dynamics) to potentially get a glimpse of what the future holds for high-performance-facades.
~Description from Form-ula
