Perfect skin: the creative and commercial quest to redefine the building skin continues to enthral.

Current preoccupations with appearance and performance make skin a conspicuous focus of attention. Impelled by the elusive quest for good looks and well-being, however, skin consultants are being sought not only by beauticians, models and the dermatologically challenged, but also by architects, engineers, enterprising developers and informed clients. And while plastic surgery, patented lotions and tattoos are being increasingly used to perfect, smooth and decorate the exterior of the human body, designers of new buildings are busy exploring other techniques in their search for the perfect skin.

At a time when the plan and section of buildings are frequently determined by the logistics of fast construction, the skin that envelops those spaces, whether revealing or concealing, light or heavy, machine-made or hand crafted, dynamic or static, plain or patterned, loosely draped or tightly stretched, not only affirms the physical appearance of architecture, but is also key to its character, performance and environmental behaviour.

Anxieties regarding cost and energy use together with the radical precision of new digital fabrication, widening ranges of alternative materials and significantly improved methods of predicting dynamic performance are combining to transform and improve the design of building skins. Post-Modernism's theatrical sets and the subsequent 'toys for boys' machined appendages have been superseded by a contemporary architecture that is, for better or worse, deeply embedded in the skin. Arguably inspired by Gehry's startling transformation of crude models into internationally recognised statements--an achievement first made possible by a blip in the commodities market and technology developed by the aircraft industry--this potent mix of design, commercial opportunism and technology transfer has projected ideas for building skins beyond superficial slickness. (1) At the same time, Herzog & de Meuron's preoccupations--whether devising surfaces of printed glass and concrete for the Eberswalde Technical School Library or more recent layerings of glass, perforated copper and wrinkled expanded aluminium mesh that wrap the de Young Museum and Walker Art Center (AR August and October 2005)--present different alternatives for the building design team and thereby encourage a willingness by clients and industry alike to support innovative research and embrace new systems of enclosure.

Global fabrication is also helping to create new skins. The raw material for a new pavilion in America, designed by Japanese architects SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), was made in Germany, fabricated into large panels in China and assembled on site to enfold a startlingly transparent, billowing curtain around new spaces alongside Toledo's neo-classical Museum of Art in Ohio, p66.

New layers of meaning

The layering of skin is encouraging new and different treatments for both humans and buildings. David Chipperfield's glass and copper mesh sandwich walls that enclose the new library in Des Moines (AR June 2006) provide shade and explore transparency as they transform throughout the day and night. His recent research into alternative high performance skins has led to the development of 12 inch thick frameless glass panels capable of creating varying opacities by the use of frit applied patterns and inner layers that promise to control light, entrain air and offer views out through a highly insulated yet shimmering, ice-like membrane. (2)

Realising the benefits of thick skin while acknowledging the inherent messiness of construction, other architects are exploring the rain screen. Constructing an open jointed outer layer to shield a waterproofed inner wall has enabled them to examine both the make-up and meaning of the built facade. New housing in France, designed by Eduoard Francois (p62), is wrapped in a loose skin of timber poles as if to recall a primitive hut, while Steven Holl's most recent project (p44) is clad in a self-rusting rain screen of CorTen. Holl's Art School in Iowa has been designed to conspicuously explore 'formless' geometries and what Holl defines as the 'fuzzy edges' that occur between design and construction, building and nature, art and architecture. Both make skins where the realities of construction and the inevitability of ageing are clearly recognised. And just as Chanel's Sublimage is presented as a new face cream for customers who 'don't want to "fight" against ageing', so this is an architecture where those unpredictable changes that time and weather inevitably bring are enthusiastically welcomed by designers.

The recycled car tyres used to clad the Environmental Education Centre in Pennsylvania (p52) and the ribbed copper cladding of the new Business School in Bifrost, designed by Studio Granda (p82), both create skins that act as emphatic signs; signs that assertively announce the function of one building and register the setting of the other. Architects Bohlin Cywinski Jackson designed a skin in response to a programme focused on the considered use of resources, while the finely corrugated copper external wall of the building in Iceland will, by virtue of its location, remain surprisingly ungreen over time and consequently provide an obvious indicator of its startlingly clean surroundings far from the pollutants that usually radically transform copper in the long term. Here too the roof, a significant piece of the skin of a building whose potential is now being widely re-assessed, is transformed into a field of lava boulders.

Skin, whether generated by the human body or wrapped around buildings, is a complex and crucial barrier. Our largest organ, it defines appearance, shapes character, maintains body temperature and fluid balance, synthesises growth factors and vitamins and helps clean up cellular wastes. (3) In new buildings the form of the external skin, which now equates to between 10 and 20 per cent of the total project cost, is becoming increasingly complex and vital as architects seek both good looks and high performance without resorting to the use of the building design equivalent of the seemingly endless and ever-increasing ranges of over-the-counter cosmeceuticals.

1 For more discussion see New Flatness: Surface Tension in Digital Architecture by Alicia Imperiale. Basel: Birkhauser Publishers, 2000, and Digital Skins: The Architecture of Surface by the same author in Skin: Surface, Substance + Design, Ellen Lupton, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.

2 Architectural Presence, by David Chipperfield, pp47-48, Anchorage Museum Association, 2006.

3 Artificial Skin: Ingrown and Outsourced, Jennifer Tobias, p44, Skin: Surface, Substance + Design, ibid.