“SolarArchitecture is not about fashion, it is about survival”

–So maybe it could be about both?!

5% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion now lives in ur­ban cen­tres. This fact im­plies a con­tri­bu­tion of 60-80% of the to­tal world en­er­gy con­sump­tion—ac­cord­ing­ly, the Glob­al en­er­gy con­sump­tion in build­ings ex­pect­ed to dou­ble and even tri­ple by 2050.

Ar­chi­tec­ture and con­struc­tion need so­lu­tions to in­te­grate non-fos­sil en­er­gy sys­tems and sus­tain­able build­ing con­cepts. The build­ing en­ve­lope of­fers enor­mous po­ten­tial for ar­eas for ur­ban en­er­gy har­vest­ing through build­ing-in­te­grat­ed pho­to­vol­taics (BIPV).

A va­ri­e­ty of BIPV de­sign op­tions arise from shape, size, lay­out, colour, dif­fer­ent PV tech­nolo­gies and ma­te­rials.
Stu­dents from ar­chi­tec­ture and prod­uct de­sign at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kas­sel are work­ing in teams on the task of so­lar ac­ti­va­tion of build­ing en­velopes in different scenarios. Bau Kunst Erfinden and Helmholtz-Berlin se­lect­ed ex­perts ac­com­pany the pro­ject as ad­vi­sors and in­put providers.

In the So­larAr­chi­tec­ture pro­ject, stu­dents have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to de­sign in­no­va­tive, sus­tain­able con­cepts for de­cen­tral­ized en­er­gy gen­er­a­tion through BIPV. The pro­ject in­tend­ed to pro­vide space to ques­tion ex­ist­ing con­ven­tions and ex­plore the op­tions and lim­i­ta­tions of so­lar ma­te­rials. The in­ter­play of de­sign pos­si­bil­i­ties and func­tio­n­al-con­struc­tive so­lu­tion ap­proach­es will be ex­amined both anal­o­gous­ly and dig­i­tal­ly through si­m­u­la­tions, mod­els and mock­ups. Stu­dents will ex­hib­it pro­cess and re­sults dig­i­tal­ly and anal­o­gous­ly in si­m­u­la­tions, mod­els, and mock­ups at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kas­sel at the end of the semester.