All items from Bustler Competitions

SKIN is a two-stage international design competition established to foster the deeper developments within the field of computational fabrication. We are soliciting design proposals that further existing research, by enabling prototyping at a larger scale or full scale, and proposals to jumpstart new research and design concepts into a first prototype. Choice of project location, contextual constraints, programmatic and functional requirements are open and should be freely interpreted to further the proposal’s thesis.

BRIEF
The building envelope and the transition between what is outside and what is inside presents the most complex and fundamentally linguistic element of architecture today. The form and performative capacity of what we might call the activated envelope is foundational and presents a dialogue the building has with itself and that of its context. A building’s skin has the potential to synchronize form and illustrates the totality of the project, while driving how the building responds to its context, its role and ultimately its utility. Fundamental to this is an explicit or implicit adaptability found in its performance – how it functions and meets the needs of the building. In the preceding 100 years since the beginning of the 21st century the transformation from a static, heavy and obfuscating series of load bearing walls, to its current role of a communicative skin, dynamical and exploratory, sets the stage for what we believe is the most important area of research in archi