Research database

With 70% of the global population expected to dwell in cities by 2050, it is essential that the building construction industry and smart city stakeholders are empowered by innovations focussed on a people-centric, sustainable, and inspiring city life. We aim to address the commonly lacking symbiosis, between architectural design excellence with architectural sustainability, by implementing a radical technological innovation in a 2 trillion € global market in smart buildings and smart cities. We envision a transformation for the built environment by implementing a multifunctional, and adaptive building skin integrated within an AI-optimised grid. The unprecedented functionality of the building skin/envelope is achieved by harnessing the properties of designed aqueous (soap) foams flowing within a structural system of interconnected modular smart building panels. The building surface within the EU28 is estimated to be ca. 120 billion square meters, that can potentially provide many building functions, e.g., indoor air quality management, thermal regulation, acoustic noise isolation, and light management. The skin also provides an adaptive and potentially intelligent renewable structure that can be used for future innovations like physical reservoir computing (reliable information processing powered by soft material dynamics). As a result, imminent metamorphosis of the building space is envisioned in domains of public health, economy, and design efficiency, empowering urban planners and administrators with an extended smart building skin that perform as sensors within a smart city. Our Phase-I project: Morpheus pathfinder, will develop the foundational infrastructure for a multifunctional key enabling building utility solution, demonstrating: 1. A one stop solution for indoor air quality management and, 2. Smart acoustics and noise management.

• Eliodoro Chiavazzo (Principal Investigator)
• Luca Bergamasco (Component of the research team)
• Louena Shtrepi (Component of the research team)