photo © Albert Vecerka

Cellophane House is a five-story, offsite fabricated dwelling commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, on view July 20 through October 20, 2008. The project is a full scale prototype that confronts several agendas head on: the economy of offsite fabrication, design for disassembly, recycled and recyclable materials, parametric modeling, and the evolution of SmartWrap™, a high-performance building skin.

The project is conceived as a system of building that allows the architecture to emerge from its opportunities and constraints. At its core, the system provides a framework for holding together a broad range of commercially available materials. In this instance, an industrial aluminum frame serves as the matrix for attaching translucent walls, floors, roof and building skin. The height of the structure forms a stack that allows the capture and release of heat from the sun, and provides ample surface area to harness solar power via the building envelope.

The outer walls of the building are made from NextGen SmartWrapTM, an advanced form of SmartWrapTM, consisting of an outer layer of transparent PET – the material used in soda bottles – and laminated with thin-film photovoltaic cells. The transparency allows sunlight to filter through the house, while solar power is harnessed through PV panels, enabling the house to function off-grid. An inner layer of 3M solar heat and UV blocking film lets daylight in while bouncing solar gain back out. A vented cavity between the two layers traps heat in the winter and vents it in the summer, greatly reducing the amount of energy required to heat and cool the house. In addition, the south side of the building features Schüco E² Glazing embedded with photovoltaic cells, promising further energy independence.

To determine the overall performance of the building and help evolve NextGen SmartWrap™ technology, meters on the building envelope and roof canopy are used to measure the capture of solar radiation. Sensors have also been placed in areas of the house to capture the thermal transfer between the exterior conditions of the house and how that affects the interior environment. By using an anemometer, the air flow in the double wall cavity will also be measured to ensure adequate circulation between all levels of the house. All wires for the tracking equipment are hidden in the Bosch Rexroth aluminum frame structure and the chase wall. All data is time stamped and records the weather conditions.

Monitoring will continue for the duration of the exhibition and the data will be analyzed to further refine the technology.

Cellophane House, interior