Smart Materials and Technologies ─ For the architecture and design professions

Today, architects and designers are beginning to look toward developments in new
"smart" or "intelligent" materials and technologies for solutions to long-standing problems
in building design. However, these new materials have so far been applied in a diverse
but largely idiosyncratic nature, because relatively few architects have access to
information about the types or properties of these new materials or technologies.
Two of the leading experts in this field - Addington and Schodek - have solved this
problem by incorporating all the relevant information of all the latest technologies
available to architects and designers in this one volume. They present materials by
describing their fundamental characteristics, and go on to identify and suggest how
these same characteristics can be exploited by professionals to achieve their design
goals. Here, the wealth of technical understanding already available in the materials
science and engineering literature is at last made accessible to a design audience.

Michelle Addington is the Hines Professor of Sustainable Architectural Design at Yale University.

Daniel L. Schodek is the Kumagai Research Professor of Architectural Technology at the Harvard Design School, where he taught from 1969 until 2008.