Adaptive textile and film-based building envelopes.

Adaptive textile and film-based building envelopes. With the ongoing development of advanced textiles and smart materials, promising new possibilities are emerging in the field of building cladding systems. The flexibility, translucency, and unique aesthetic characteristics of high-performance textiles present a wide range of architectural potential, while their light weight, simplicity, and typically discrete construction offer significant advantages with respect to recyclability and sustainable design. Designed with care, textile materials have the potential to revolutionize the building envelope, in the form of multilayer adaptive textile cladding systems. This article will explore the challenging requirements which must be met by these systems, explain the concept of multilayer textile- and film-based envelopes, and describe their unique behavioural characteristics in the building science context. The need for accurate material property characterization and advanced simulation techniques will also be discussed.