Climate adaptive building shell

Climate adaptive building shell (CABS) is a term in building engineering that describes the group of facades and roofs that interact with the variability in their environment in a dynamic way. Conventional buildings have static building envelopes, and can therefore not act in response to changing weather conditions and occupant requirements. Climate adaptive building shells, on the other hand do have the ability to change with time. Well-designed CABS have two main functions: they contribute to energy-saving for heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting; and they induce a positive impact on the indoor environmental quality of buildings.

Loonen et al. defines CABS as follows:

A climate adaptive building shell has the ability to repeatedly and reversibly change some of its functions, features or behavior over time in response to changing performance requirements and variable boundary conditions, and does this with the aim of improving overall building performance.

Modern construction methods, developments in material sciences, and availability of controllable kinetic façade components now offer rich possibilities for innovative building envelope solutions that respond better to the environmental context, thereby allowing the façade to ‘‘behave’’ as a living organism. Nature is regarded as one of the most prominent inspiration sources for CABS. Adaptability is pervasive in nature, and efforts in biomimetics to convey nature's time-tested ideas to the context of buildings are rewarding. The way people sweat, shiver and adjust clothes has been used by many as a metaphor to conceive the building skin as a living membrane. Likewise, several CABS concepts imitate tropism: plants’ directional growth or rotation in the direction of certain environmental triggers. Both phototropism (i.e. changing in response to light) and heliotropism (i.e. changing in response to the sun) have been transformed effectively into CABS concepts, enabling timely collection and rejection of solar energy [59] and [60].

CABS is only one designation for a facade concept that can been described by a range of different terms. Several variations on the term ‘adaptive’ can be used, including: active, advanced, dynamic, intelligent, interactive, kinetic, responsive, smart and switchable. In addition, the concepts of responsive architecture, kinetic architecture, intelligent building are closely related. The main difference with CABS is that the adaptation takes place at the building shell level, whereas the other concepts consider a whole-building approach.

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