Heliotropic Daylighting Facade
Photo credit Ben Irons // Ben Starling
Author Ben Irons // Ben Starling
The system uses a dynamic heliotropic reflectors which adjust their position based on their geolocation, time and date to track the position of the sun.
Static secondary reflectors positioned outside the top of northern facing windows reflect light redirected from the dynamic reflectors into the north facing rooms towards the ceiling for to passively daylight otherwise shaded north facing rooms. The shroud which transitions its wooden slat design language into the secondary reflector frame, offers more than a decorative camouflage. It’s equally important design intent is to offer wind buffer protection to the mechatronic components and the dynamic reflectors which would suffer from becoming sails in high winds. Further development of the shroud would be to test the effectiveness of the shroud as a wind buffer and alongside considering potential design fail safes such as resting the dynamic reflects to a ‘safe’ position during high winds, and or wind diverting components on top of the building.
