In the building’s skin that concerns us this month, we are seeking a polyvalent, scalable, beautiful and harmonious way of protecting or covering a simple rectangular-shaped building (irrespective of size). In art, in painting or sculpture as well as architecture, when we speak of beauty and harmony we have to talk about the golden ratio.
The golden ratio or golden rule has been used by mathematicians to explain certain types of organic shapes that we find in nature, especially in a type of molluscs called Nautilus. This type of spiral shapes are called logarithmic spirals.
Inspired on the Nautilus’s shape, we propose a building’s skin that embraces and protects the building and which offers the following advantages:
● It’s scalable; in other words, its efficiency and harmony don’t decrease with the change of scale, so it is optimum for a large commercial building or metro station, as well as a small bathroom module.
● It creates a protected and spacious front to the building, an especially advantageous aspect in countries with extreme meteorological conditions.
● It breaks up the building’s rectangular shape and offers an organic visual appeal, far removed from straight lines, useful when looking for architecture that breaks away from the usual geometry of urban edification.
● It’s structurally efficient and light and therefore economic to build.
Nature creates this type of shapes in the most efficient way possible and as architects we consider that efficiency, together with functionality and harmony, constitute the most important virtues of the building.
