Kinetic Skin Wall

Barkow Leibinger's full-scale wall section comes at the end of a room devoted to walls. At the opposite end is a very old, load-bearing stone wall, and in between are a brick wall, a shoji partition, a glass system, and others, all parallel to each other. The moving parts in the kinetic skin wall are telescoping stainless steel rods that move in and out to stretch the tensile fabric and modify the space in between its surface and the adjacent glass wall. A thin surface with a sizable infrastructure of motors and framing behind it, the kinetic skin wall hints at some of the changes happening to the elements of architecture through current technologies.