Entry Title: " GREENskin Facade System"
Company: Interstice Architects, Inc. , United States
Category: Professional, Product
Designer(s): Arjun Bhat


Entry Description:

GREENskin is a permanent storefront glazing system made entirely of re-claimed Insulated Glazing Units (IGUs) salvaged from the local construction industry and reassembled to create a new shop-front in San Franciscos Mission Commercial District. The system seamlessly receives the random shapes, sizes, colors, and thicknesses of this ubiquitous waste stream material, to create a continuous weather-proof skin at street level.

Five horizontal steel shelves are stretched across the entire facade set at varying offsets, which reduce vertically as they ascend. This allows the IGUs to be overlapped like glass shingles, creating a fish-scale faade of transparent salvaged units. The vertical modulation allows for larger units at the bottom, and smaller units at the top, all leaning into the system like frames on display shelves. Two existing entry doors are accommodated into the airtight reclaimed skin. The minimal steel assembly is 75% recycled content and the IGUs are 100% reclaimed material.

The salvaged units are arranged and rotated to create the most continuous horizontal skin possible across each shelf. FSC-certified wood is used for the doors and infill strips at edge conditions. The geometry, color, transmittance, and reflective quality of the individual found units varies widely producing an unexpected play of light and shadow across the GREENskins surface, tinting views through a Mondrian-like structure of intersecting frames and reflections.

Interstice Architects was founded in 2000 by architect Andrew Dunbar and landscape architect Zoee Astrakhan. After years of working in separate disciplines, the arbitrary distinctions were just too constraining, so Interstice was born as a multidisciplinary firm of architects, landscape architects urban designers and visual artists. Over the past ten years, this critical practice has grown designing public and private spaces on projects of multiple scales, focused on the broadest possible interpretation of the constructed realm.

As an integrated practice, IA combines professional services concentrating the experience of these shared disciplines to create a civic minded practice, where all staff are active citizens and advocates for better communities. Working with private clients, City Agencies, Redevelopment Agencies, Task Forces and other institutional organizations we design collaborations rather than dictating solutions, viewing constraints as opportunities, we reach for the unexpected by exposing root problems. Personally and professionally, we reside in the city and create from an immersed point of view. Our work is inspired by constant research into the urban condition and those idiosyncratic social, historical and ecological aspects that make each project challenging and distinctive.

IA is a collaborative of civic-minded individuals that embrace sustainability as integral to lasting and relevant planning and design. As designers, educators and urban activists, we strive to imbue material and space with identity, to create simple and sustainable solutions through intelligent infrastructures. We are material explorers and strategists prioritizing long term, fundamental change: creating solutions where things not only appear different, they are different.

Collaborating closely with our diverse clients, from private residential, to institutional and civic agencies, IA works without walls, in a very big room, with lots of extra chairs...

* 2011 Green Awards - 1st Place Winner - Product Category
* 2011 Green Awards - 1st Place Winner - Concept Category