Second Skin

Project description Second Skin, by Wilkinson Eyre with engineers Eckersley O’Callaghan, is a theoretical study exploring how New York’s ageing office stock can be re-purposed to retain the bulk of a building’s fabric and associated embodied carbon, bring buildings up to modern design aspirations and halve their energy use. Taking a typical 1960s building, 63 Madison Avenue, it looks at retaining the superstructure while replacing all cladding and servicing to give it a contemporary image and a new lease of life. This thinking could be applied to thousands of office buildings in New York and around the world and is intended to tackle the waste of knocking down buildings, which are often only fifty years old or less. The design employed the concept of an 'adaptive net' facade; creating a habitable area of balconies and winter gardens across the surface of the building, incorporated into a regular cladding system. The net responds to the specifics of the building's locale; protecting against city conditions of noise, pollution and wind; while exploiting sunlight, optimising views out and introducing natural greening. The façade was mapped and a kit of parts developed to deal with orientation and specific site conditions. A system of external shading/reflectors was developed to provide shade, reduce glare and increase daylight penetration, hereby increasing the quality of light and improving the daylit floor area by 20%. Thermal modelling demonstrated that this concept (combined with an improvement in the efficiency of M&E equipment) would offer an annual 50% reduction in carbon emissions as well as an embodied carbon offset after only four years. The proposed planting and vegetation strategy is also responsive to light, heat, humidity and seasonal variations; its baseline palette selected to increase biodiversity and ecological resilience by reflecting the pre-settlement diversity of ‘Mannahatta’. The modular design utilises a simple tensile support system, using top hung cables strutted off curtain wall mullions which avoid cold bridging. The variety of components -suspended in space –are optimised against site analysis and could also be swapped during the life of the building, as uses change. This tuned approach seeks to use s-mart (parametric) design with simple fabrication techniques that are both replicable and adaptable putting the user and their wellness at the centre of the design. Drawing upon knowledge from the industry, the system captures some of the principles of a closed cavity facade (CCF) curtain wall but in a simpler manner by utilising dry-sealed glazing as opposed to conventional wet-sealed (silicone) construction. This means glazing units can be refurbished rather than replaced which should increase the anticipated service life of units by 60%, as well as allowing for efficient deconstruction, recycling and re-use. Second Skin was originally entered in the international Metals in Construction 2020 Design Challenge, where it won first prize.