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comment SOM Teams with RPI to Create Center for Architecture Science and Ecology
Skidmore, Owens, and Merrill LLP (SOM) recently announced a pioneering partnership with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), a top technological university located in Troy, New York. After tinkering with their alliance with the RPI School of Architecture's Built Ecologies program for a year, SOM has made the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE) official, where groups of graduate and doctoral students work on conceptual design projects out of SOM's New York offices, guided by RPI professor Anna Dyson and mentored by working architects. The students focus on cutting-edge green design solutions to practical and theoretical design challenges.
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Carl Galioto FAIA, the director of the CASE program at SOM, claims that “the intention, of course, is for them [the students] to have regular interaction with the senior designers, whether it’s specifically on a project or in general discussions. Either way there needs to be a belief in the formal and regularized interaction and also the serendipity of personal interaction.” Students entering the program can expect to work on proprietary projects that have real world applications. Part of SOM’s goal in developing and formalizing the CASE program was to stay ahead of the technological curve, and to avoid having to wait for innovative and environmentally beneficial products to emerge from the marketplace.
Some of the projects the program will test are theoretical, and won’t be developed in time for actual implementation, but SOM intends to deploy new CASE designs as they are completed in the slower research cycles. One of the projects currently being researched by the CASE team includes constructing chimneys planted with carbon-monoxide eating plants over covered roadways that would clean car exhaust. Galioto also mentions a design project for secure government facilities that involves installing interior green walls that would provide oxygen in the case of a sealed lockdown. One ambitious design involves creating active exterior walls with electropolymers. These are thin films that work within insulating glass cavities inside windows that have daylight sensor controls, eliminating the need for interior shades. “These pixilated membranes would move in such a way as to create changing patterns on the glass, which would restrict the amount of daylight going into the space and the amount of solar heat gain based on the control conditions,” explains Galioto.
SOM is involved in direct partnerships with manufacturers, so the above solutions aren’t simply design wish lists. The core philosophy of the program, however, remains geared toward innovative built ecologies. When asked about the ownership of the proprietary technologies developed by CASE, Galioto answers “that’s not really our main motivation. Maybe we could be better business people, but we’re interested in designing good buildings.” Can other firms use said technologies if they prove successful? “Of course.”
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