A London designer makes windows that are both beautiful and intelligent

London designer Simon Heijdens’s latest installation “Shade” is impressing design experts across the U.S. and the U.K. To start, Heijdens’ applied a unique film to large glass windows that creates constantly-changing shadows inside in response to weather conditions outside. The reactive film is best described as “a responsive skin,” equipped with sensors that filter daylight and wind patterns from the outside to project a geometric pattern of natural shadows into the room.

The responsive film holds a grid of triangles that each individually fade between transparent and opaque, and hence block or pass light. As the angle of light and patterns of wind are continuously changing throughout the day and year, so too does the inside space. See a video of the installation here. The exhibition was commissioned by the Art Institute Chicago, and will be shown as a part of its Hyperlinks exhibition that runs up to July 20, 2011.

via @Dezeen