Shelter is provided by the polyester film. "We found technologies that were interesting for building and then found material scientists at DuPont and products engineers at ILC Dover to put it together," architect Karl Wallick of KieranTimberlake said of the collaboration with ILC Dover, a company mostly involved in aerospace work. The concept arose in a graduate research laboratory offered by architects Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design. If you have visions of an oversized circuit board, you're not far off the mark, especially when the SmartWrap's lighting comes on.
A SmartWrap wall integrates all these components and more by printing them onto one sturdy film envelope. Imagine a construction site where various systems - electrical, heating and cooling, insulation - must be layered in sequentially. SmartWrap, as it's called, promises to make the building process smarter, faster and more sustainable, while more directly reflecting users' preferences. While the storm underscored that the mock-up is not to be taken literally as a building - rain fell into parts of the pavilion left purposely uncovered - its impact wasn't dampened. In a recent press preview at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, that coincided with a robust rainstorm, exhibitions curator Matilda McQuaid said the new building envelope, created by a Philadelphia team, "could have extraordinary impact in changing the way we design and build three to five years down the road." Yet the piece, its developers say, is meant to represent shelter, too - it's just fashioned from a thinner building "skin" that promises to function much like traditional walls while employing technologies not usually associated with construction. With brightly patterned films wrapped around an aluminum frame, it conjured images of a Christo installation, but on a smaller scale. At first glance, the offbeat little structure on the lawn outside the museum looked like a provocative work of art.
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