Princeton student Denisa Buzatu’s vision for an environmentally sustainable building is a sort of shape-shifting origami façade. For her senior thesis, Buzatu, is designing and prototyping a structure that shades the façade of a building by folding and adapting its shape in response to sunlight.
Her design takes advantage of a type of wire that contracts when current is applied to it and yet “remembers” and returns to its original shape. These wires make up the edges of eight triangular faces, which are combined to form a seamless surface, and can be activated individually or in combination by a microcontroller to fold the surface in myriad ways.