Self healing building skins
With rapid developments in nanotechnology I hope we are going to start seeing more active facade systems which respond to their environment and even self heal.
Our Filmic House project proposed a rubber clad house which changed colour in response to thermal loadings on the surface. In the same way humans are covered in a self healing 'skin' we saw EPDM rubber as a logical simplification of the construction process taking one continuous material across the whole building surface. The Bilbao Guggenheim museum uses rubberised asphalt which enables the titanium cladding to be fixed straight through the waterproof membrane. It therefore isn't too difficult to imagine rubber incorporating self-healing technology that would keep the building watertight even if damaged. Below is a presentation on self-healing paint that triggered this thought:
