CHROMOGENIC DWELLING

San Francisco, CA

_Honorable Mention Award

, Possible Futures International Digital Competition, Bienal Miami + Beach, Miami.

6 living unit + shops/cafe building proposal for the Octavia Boulevard Housing Competition.

A strategy was invented for situating large building volumes that maximize occupied floor area into smaller, highly textured neighborhoods by the utilization an electronic version of camouflage. Unlike most camouflage strategies that match context through representational mimicry, the

Chromogenic Dwelling

propose the use of the opposite tactic: bold patterns radically blanket an object to be disguised, rendering it difficult to discern as overall perceptual associations are disrupted. Known as Disruptive Patterning System camouflage, or DPS, larger forms dissolve into a broad visual noise of indefinable geometries.

To create its DPS skin, the

Chromogenic Dwelling

uses electrochromic glass to create a real-time changing texture of visible solids and voids. In response to climate, light effects, and privacy requirements, the building’s occupants electronically switch the thermal glass into an opaque, transparent, or translucent exterior surface mode. What emerges is a cumulative building image constantly on the move, and a virtual fragmentation of the building’s mass.

Faulders Studio team:

Thom Faulders, Jessica Kmetovic, Pasak Ongwattanagul, Agnessa Torodova-Dowell

_2005