Energy Forum 2011 for Solar Building Skins
© 2011 EPFL
A new edition of the annual Energy Forum on Solar Building Skins took place in Bressanone (Italy) on December 6-7, 2011. Its strong interdisciplinary focus allows architects to interact with engineers, scientists, building managers and manufacturers on the newest advances in high performance envelopes.
Prof. Marilyne Andersen, committee member of the Energy Forum since 2009 and strongly engaged in interdisciplinary research on building performance as head of the LIPID laboratory at EPFL, chaired the Enhanced Daylighting and Shading session which attracted a wide variety of technical papers ranging from early stage modeling to hybrid shading technologies.
The Energy Forum conference brings a new perspective to design performance research focused on design practice and specifically on the building skin. As such, it offers an interesting complement to other international conferences like the recent CISBAT event at EPFL, where Prof. Andersen’s research group also presented four research articles on visual comfort and eye movement patterns, on health implications of exposure to light, on performance metrics for advanced façade materials and on an innovative, goal-based and highly visual simulation platform for annual daylighting called Lightsolve.