Sunday, June 15, 2008

Shades of Shigeru: Curtain Wall made of curtains generates power

Via Engadget, Architect magazine, and Inhabitat, we bring you word of Kennedy and Violich's Soft House, which would replace a home's outer surfaces with moveable curtains woven with photovoltaic collectors that they claim could produce half of the 16 KW of direct current required by a 1,200 foot domicile. And while, in the visuals you'll find at the sites linked here, they look less like curtains than laundry billowing dry in the wind and the threads themselves, which look like a cross between a zipper and a DNA strand, are so expensive to manufacture as to be, at least at the moment, prohibitively expensive - hey, you've got to start somewhere.

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