Their Latrobe Fellowship proposal had its beginnings in lab discussions about transfer technologies, and another thread running through all four labs has been a search for new building materials. “Most walls are built up of thousands of individual parts, multiple layers, and they’re really thick,” says Kieran. What if walls could be thinner, they asked, with the elements to provide shelter, climate control, light, and power already integrated into the wall when it arrived at the construction site?

Their answer is SmartWrap, “a mass customizable print façade” touted as “the building envelope of the future.” Only millimeters thick, it is made of a polymer material—think plastic soda bottles—combined with tiny components called phase-change materials (PCMs) that control temperature, organic light-emitting diode technology (OLED) to provide lighting and information displays, and solar cells to collect power. These components are printed or imbedded in the polymer using modern technologies for printing and lamination. SmartWrap “very much comes out of the laboratory, out of the collective intelligence of many students, ourselves, outside collaborators, and invited guests over a period of those laboratories,” says Kieran.

From August 15 through October 10, a 16-foot-square and 24-foot-high SmartWrap pavilion was exhibited in New York at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s outdoor terrace and garden as the first in its Solos exhibition series. (It withstood Hurricane Isabel, which made its way up the East Coast in September.) And from January 24-April 4, SmartWrap will be set up in the lobby of the Institute of Contemporary Art, the firm’s first exhibition on Penn’s campus.

A central theme in Refabricating Architecture has to do with technological advances that have made possible a seeming oxymoron, mass customization. For example, SmartWrap can be printed in a variety of patterns and can even change appearance according to climate conditions, and the manufacturer of the Levine Hall curtain wall was able to provide a range of windowpane patterns to give the units a varied appearance without slowing down the production schedule. With such corporate partners as DuPont, the firm has researched various types of modular construction.

“That thread is not only in the studio but in the full-time research that we’re doing here. Much of that research we’re trying to apply,” says Timberlake. “We’re building modular bathrooms and modular vanities for clients. We’re building a whole building that way for Yale.”

In that project, the university’s chief financial officer told them that “more money had to come out” of a building project without compromising quality. “If you grew up the way we did, you’d just say, ‘You can’t do that. If you want more quality, you have to spend more.’ But at Boeing and in the automotive industry, nobody does that.

“Well, we said, ‘We’re glad you asked. Here’s an idea for an off-site fabrication’” that would save money and installation time, and also was of “exceptional quality,” Kieran recalls. “We were able to do that because we had done the homework and the research. We got DuPont to pay us to do a prototype. That makes all the difference to success. Those that are prepared, succeed—and the research labs here and at Penn allow us to be prepared.”

With opportunities “to teach and also to build,” Penn has offered the partners “a direct link back into the Penn community, and an active link, a participating link,” says Timberlake. “Oftentimes, it’s the undergraduates that have that connection back into their alma mater—and Steve and I have that with our undergraduate schools as well—but I think we have a very direct connection to Penn and the Penn community.”

As at Penn, a lot of their work these days deals with “collections of buildings,” says Timberlake. “They are urban-design scale projects that involve not any single element on campus, but really remaking the campus.”

In whatever realm, “we look for the interesting project,” he adds. “Often people come to us with difficult problems, and they want the difficult problems solved. Those are the ones that intrigue us.”