Perpetual Climate Glass Pavilion
Laura Hepp
Bradley Rothenberg
Denon Sheppard
Zeroth Systems is a building technology startup developing bioclimatic products for architecture. Founded in 2021 by architect Octave Perrault, its goal is to provide architects and developers with efficient and reliable climate control solutions for buildings without relying on the current mechanical paradigm.
The Perpetual Climate Glass Pavilion project would be realised in collaboration with various engineering and manufacturing partners, including: nTopology, PuntoZero, and Xtreee.
The project will focus on developing a design for the Perpetual Climate Glass Pavilion that can be built.
Inspired by perpetual motion, the objetive is to make a habitable glass enveloppe where the climate is regulated passively and without moving parts, so that it works forever without breaking.
The central columns traversing the simple glass buildings maintain the interior spaces at a comfortable temperature through the natural movement of air inside it. The geometries are produced to maximise the desirable flows of fluids and exchanges of energy between exterior and interior. Effectively, the climate is controlled *by design* rather than *by machines*.
By making use of advanced computational fluid dynamics to generate complex parametric shapes with additive manufacturing, the project calls for an approach to passive architectural design that is both non-mechanical and high-tech.
The project is also a statement towards the heritage of modernist architecture. The dominance of glass in contemporary architecture is one of the greatest obstacle to a passive building future. The project attempts to highlight this state-of affair by critically designing for it while proposing a solution, albeit aesthetically unconventional and hardly scalable.