Historically, Buildings have provided shelter and protection to people from external conditions, and the building envelope acts as a physical barrier between internal and external environments. It is one of the most important design parameters to help maintain indoor thermal comfort and on the efficiency of the building occupant's productivity, also in influencing the energy consumption of the building. However, with constantly changing the external environmental conditions that boundary the envelope, and with the improvement of building services such as lighting, heating, air-cooled to enhance indoor thermal comfort. Building bearing a significant energy burden to maintain the indoor optimal comfort for the building and as a consequence the traditional static external building envelope is starting to lose its role as a mediator for comfort and energy.
In the light of technological development in the late of twentieth century and advances in computer engineering, cybernetics and artificial intelligence, building materials and other developments associated with building science. Enabled development and implementation of some of the building envelopes, which called the building skin, and with it changed the concept and the perception of building façade from static facade to dynamic façade as response to changing environmental stimuli. The role of the facade shifted from just a barrier between the inside and outside for protection from the external environment to it is an environmental filter to provide a comfortable indoor spaces increase the health and productivity of building occupants, and building consumption as little as of energy.
The appearance of this new generation of building envelopes (building skin) accompanies metaphor a set of terms and concepts from the discipline of biology when describing different designs of building skin, to understand the behavior and design of its systems and control of it. Among the biological concepts that many practitioners, researchers of architects associate with concept of building skin, and underlying research study, are the concept of Responsive - High performance - Adaptive - Intelligent - Kinetic - Smart – interactive. The problem lies in the use of these concepts loosely and interchangeably as synonyms for each other or synonyms of the term of building skin, when examining many literature or research literatures. This loose use creating blurring of the boundaries of the interval between them and confusion in identifying their respective roles and their relationship to the performance of building envelope.
This research based on the study of the semantic meaning for both the concept of building skin and concepts associated with it under consideration to realization the precise meaning of each of them, and set the boundaries of the interval between them and determine their respective role, to deriving and define the relationship between these concepts in terms of extent of synonymy or difference and independence all of them. In addition, the extent of the Interconnection of these concepts together in terms of include some of the concepts and comprehensiveness for many of implicit concepts its constituent that generates a series of interrelated concepts. In order to form a common language and base of knowledge among architects and researchers with regard to the building skin. Then the research study concludes with results and recommendations that will help specialists in navigating between concepts consciously without overlapping and mixing them.