Book Chapter for "Advanced Materials in Smart Building Skins for Sustainability: From Nano to Macroscale" (2023) is out at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-09695-2 and entitled "Low Energy Adaptive Biological Material Skins from Nature to Buildings" (Pages 59-72), discussing emergent work in large-scale interactive building skins that use biological materials derived from abundant, renewable, biodegradable sources like silk, algae, wood, cellulose, chitin, fungi, or bacteria. They are surveyed as new interactive systems for material-driven environmental sensing and response within the outer layer of architectural applications. Programmed at the molecular scale, they respond to their surroundings at the building scale by; self-healing cracks, performing programmed decay, tuning flexibility and opacity depending on sunlight and rain, changing color to diagnose health markers, shapeshifting with humidity changes, digesting waste into structure, cooling and cleaning air, or transforming city pollutants into fuel and aliments. Demonstrators are often in testing phases, but critical in signaling a future for sustainable material systems offering adaptive solutions at the intersection of building construction and biotechnology that are elegant in both their efficiency and new aesthetics.
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