Sculpting with Architecture’s Third Skin

Doris Sung is an award-winning artist, architect, and researcher whose work explores next-generation methods of design and fabrication. For FUTURE FORWARD, The Creators Project's partnership with the all-new Prius, we challenged Sung to create an original work inspired by the innovative technology at the heart of the 2016 Prius. Sung's "Kinetic Chandelier" will be a sculpture made of a thermobimetal, a material that expands and contracts with temperature swings. Like the all-new Prius, Sung's work challenges our assumptions about design and technology while actively shaping its future. The "Kinetic Chandelier" is a forward-looking artistic manifestation into the way humans continue to design and fabricate their spaces.

Doris Sung is on a mission to create a "third skin." From her perspective, the first is our human skin, the second is our clothing, and the third should be the buildings we inhabit. As founder of dO|Su Studio Architecture and an assistant professor at the University of Southern California School of Architecture, Sung has spent more than 15 years exploring how to make structures responsive to their environment and the people inside of them. Now, she's closer than ever to creating living, breathing buildings.

Sung is developing a "hanging kinetic chandelier," inspired by the theme of technology. Here, Sung and team push the boundaries of third skin concepts to include vehicles as structures we inhabit. This revisualization of design and ecological considerations brings about new opportunities in the way we make transportation responsive.

Though the final shape is still being experimented with, she is creating it using thermobimetal—a sheet metal that uses the technology of material responsiveness combining two different alloys of metal, one of which expands more than the other when heated, which causes the material to curl. Thermobimetal is used most commonly in thermostats, but Sung struck on the idea of using it in building design, creating structures that changed shape as temperatures shift: perpetual motion being essentially programmed within the structures themselves through the use of this material technology. "Most of our work is finding new ways to think about materials for buildings," says Sung. "We believe they should be responsive to the environment and operate without energy and controls. That's what makes it so smart."

But while the heat-activated materials she's using may be similar to what Sung has used in other projects, how it is triggered in her latest effort is new. The sun or body heat have acted as heat sources in previous projects, but for this one, Sung and her team are trying to use lighting to instigate the curling of the material. These surfaces shift with parts moving as a whole structure, creating designs that look more like intricate organisms, futuristic plants, or animals, rather than buildings. Though the specific design of the project is still evolving, Sung says it "may be something between a flower's blooming petals, a porcupine's flaring quills, or a fish's breathing gills." Because of this interplay between the material and its environment, biology offers important sources of inspiration to Sung and her work. The individual pieces move and operate as if they are alive, requiring Sung and her team to make sure each little piece behaves as it is supposed to with all the others.

"Because we have to work with small pieces to make larger surfaces—what we call 'tessellate'—there is some level of uniformity in how it can behave. There needs to be a system," says Sung. "That way, we can allow each piece to have its own personality, but conform to its family of pieces and pattern." Sung and her team use this approach on other projects in their portfolio. One example is a "micro library" for the USC Science and Engineering Library, which spins the idea of what one is not supposed to do in a library. "So, we made a screaming machine… very much like a science experiment," says Sung. "But, of course, it looks like art, too."

"Each project we do stretches our design capabilities to think about solutions in completely different ways," says Sung. "Each project inevitably informs others, allowing us to build upon ideas to delve deeper into complex movements, to think more broadly, to see things from different perspectives, and to consider things that we normally would not do."

To learn more about Doris Sung, click here.

The Future Forward event series presented by the all-new Prius will take place in three cities: in New York on June 4th, in Chicago on June 18th, and in LA on June 25. We will be posting full-length behind-the-scenes video profiles leading up to the kickoff event in New York City. RSVP for the Future Forward event series here.