Adaptive TRIO: 145 kgCO₂/m² Facade Embodied Carbon. SKYHIVE International, Shortlisted.

The Brief

What if a skyscraper could respond to climate the way nature responds to chaos?

Climate change and its consequences are in constant flux, at times chaotic, at times systematic, or perhaps chaos containing a system. That last case has a precise mathematical form: the Rössler attractor, the three nonlinear differential equations Otto Rössler studied in the 1970s. The equations are deterministic yet chaotic, their behaviour held in order by a fractal geometry. Adaptive TRIO, a commercial office tower for CityLife, Milan, among the Generali, Allianz, and CityWave towers, derives its form from those equations not as an aesthetic choice but as a logical one: to answer a chaotic-systematic climate with a system of the same nature. The attractor became the base of the tower form and its main structural frames, and the same logic carries through to the environmental response. The challenge: design a skyscraper whose envelope adapts to the humid subtropical climate Cfa of the Po Valley while reducing embodied carbon. The tower integrates the SHELL ternary envelope system developed through multi-objective evolutionary optimisation, directly linking form to environmental performance.

The Approach

The SHELL Protocol Applied

The ternary unit was a performance result, not a thematic choice: within the thesis, the SHELL tool tested three panel types (Ternary, Quaternary, and Hexa) for Milan's climate, and the ternary unit returned the best performance. The SHELL ternary envelope system was applied to the tower envelope through parametric modelling in Grasshopper. Solar radiation, daylight factor, and thermal performance were analysed with Ladybug and Honeybee through the SHELL workflow across hundreds of design iterations. Multi-objective evolutionary optimisation through the SHELL protocol evaluated solutions across competing performance criteria.

The embodied carbon energy of the envelope was calculated directly in Grasshopper using Galapagos. Every facade component was specified from the start for screw fixation assembly: no adhesives, fully reusable, designed for disassembly at end of life.

Outcome

The Result

The ternary kinetic envelope achieved optimised solar control and daylight distribution with a measured embodied carbon of 145 kgCO₂/m² of facade. Life Cycle Assessment was conducted in Grasshopper using a design-for-disassembly approach, every component joined by screw fixation, no adhesives, fully reusable. The work earned dual recognition: Worthy of Mention for the thesis at Politecnico di Torino, and a shortlist in the SKYHIVE International High-Rise Architecture Competition.