Nowadays, the building skin acts as an intermediate between the external environment and its enclosed spaces. It is considered as the first line of defense for protecting buildings from the surrounding environment. The concept of building skin makes it one of the main solutions in the face of environmental changes. Skins of the organisms provide an important database of multiple adaptive strategies and make use of them in the architecture of the building's skin.
The research discusses the concept of analogy between the function of skin in living organisms and its function in architecture, and the importance of this concept to explore the problem of the lack of clarity of the meaning of analogy in different stages of the process in the corresponding architectural functions, cases of usage, and the relationship between environmental variables that affect these functions and mechanisms. The research then explores the four main themes of the skin function – thermos regulation, water balance, protection and communication – and how can be analogized to adapt the environmental conditions and reflect the analogy between the skin of organism and the building skin. Finally, the research describes the analogy relationship between the function in each theme, in addition, a comparative analytical study that deals with the presentation of the similar model and analogy applications in the buildings in order to achieve the ways of applying the ideas to solve the problems that the designer can meet for compatibility and adaptation to the surrounding environment, thus promoting the development of various design solutions. In addition, it opens up new horizons that enable designers to create accurate design and morphological solutions from the beginning of design.
At the end of the research, the results will provide help to designers to understand the determinants of those functions and processes that can improve the performance of building skins to incubate environmental changes.