Breathing skins for wind modulation through morphology: Toward integrating turbulence studies within tectonic scale for design of façade components

This study aims to investigate the design power to manipulate the behaviour and characteristics of air through geometrical manipulation of building skins. The simple cubic cells in the global system of a porous screen were manipulated to investigate the impacts of screen's morphology on the air movement pattern within and around it. The results we discovered from the evaluation of several screen systems revealed trends in response to the careful manipulation of effective shape parameters within a designed matrix of variations as a Matrix of Possible Effective Typologies (MPET). In this research, the main principles of framing the initial matrix were based on: a) Creating pressure differences across the screens as a result of surface intrusion and extrusion compositions. b) Changing the nature of the airflow (velocity and turbulence variation) with geometrical manipulations of the inlet and outlet of the screens' components. Experimental and numerical studies were undertaken in parallel including the use of a wind tunnel with very smooth flow with precision wind sensors and the numerical studies by Computational Fluid Dynamics. The aim of this paper is to present part of the empirical investigations to demonstrate the power of geometry in shaping the air patterns, altering pressure and velocity through geometrical modification of porous surfaces for future applications.