Nanotechnologies and Architecture

The biggest plans for the future of our built environment are actually very, very small. The eight billion dollar per year nanotechnology industry has already begun to transform our buildings and how we use them; if its potential becomes reality, it could transform our world in ways undreamed of.

Nanotechnology has the potential to radically alter our built environment and how we live. It is potentially the most transformative technology we have ever faced, generating more research and debate than nuclear weapons, space travel, computers or any of the other technologies that have shaped our lives.

It brings with it enormous questions, concerns and consequences. It raises hopes and fears in every aspect of our lives—social, economic, cultural, political, and spiritual. Yet its potential to transform our built environment remains largely unexplored. What, for instance, is the future of building if each of us possesses thermoprotectant skins that shelter us from the elements? How do we interact with our environment, and with each other, if walls and roofs become paper-thin, permeable, or even invisible?

Nanotechnology, the ability to manipulate matter at the scale of less than one billionth of a meter, has the potential to transform the built environment in ways almost unimaginable today. Nanotechnology is already employed in the manufacture of everyday items from sunscreen to clothing, and its introduction to architecture is not far behind. On the near horizon, it may take building enclosure materials (coatings, panels and insulation) to dramatic new levels of performance in terms of energy, light, security and intelligence.

Even these first steps into the world of nanotechnology could dramatically alter the nature of building enclosure and the way our buildings relate to environment and user. At midhorizon, the development of carbon nanotubes and other breakthrough materials could radically alter building design and performance. The entire distinction between structure and skin, for example, could disappear as ultra light, super-strong materials functioning as both structural skeleton and enclosing skin are developed.

The biggest changes to shake up architecture in a long time may have their origins in the very, very small. Nanotechnology, the understanding and control of matter at a scale of one- to one hundred-billionths of a meter, is bringing incredible changes to the materials and processes of building. How ready we are to embrace them could make a big differencein the future of architectural practice.

Already, this new science of the small has brought to market self-cleaning windows, smogeating concrete and toxin-sniffing nanosensors. Three hundred nanoengineered products are commercially available; $32 billion worth of them were sold last year, with sales expected to top $1 trillion by 2015. But these off-the-shelf advances offer only a taste of what's incubating in the world's nanotech labs today. There, work is under way on nanocomposites thin as glass, yet capable of supporting entire buildings, and photosynthetic coatings that can make any building surface a source of free energy.