It is often said that beauty is only skin deep, and yet striking — sometimes astonishing —  façades are quickly becoming a device to charm developers, funders, and the public alike. Clients are beginning to understand what architects have long known: innovative building skins can be used to woo investors and buyers for commercial projects as well as funders for museums and universities. Because apparently impossible structures jar us out of our everyday pursuits and force us to contemplate the built-environment, unusual façades generate a tremendous amount public interest in contemporary architecture as well. But more than just a potential selling point, building skins are evolving as new computer technologies, new materials and new societal behaviors are changing the perception of architecture.  As architecture is functioning more as a synthetic organism working within its surrounding ecosystem, more literal comparisons are being made between biological skins and built skins, and thus the topic for the tenth bi-annual Virginia Design Forum was born.

The Virginia Society AIA has assembled some of the world’s most acknowledged experts on building skins to speak at the upcoming tenth Virginia Design Forum: SKINS in Charlottesville on March 16 and 17, 2012.

Keynote Speaker Kim Herforth Nielsen is founder and principal of 3XN. He graduated from the Aarhus School of Architecture in 1981 and was one of three founders of 3XN in 1986 (all with the surname Nielsen). He has been involved in all the practice’s major projects, including The Blue Planet, Kubus in Berlin, Museum of Liverpool, Ørestad College, Muziekgebouw Concert Hall in Amsterdam, the Danish Embassy in Berlin, and the Architects’ House in Copenhagen. Often called upon as a jury member in international architectural competitions, and as lecturer at art academies and universities around the world, Nielsen is also a Knight of Dannebrog and has received Denmark’s highest architectural honor, the C.F. Hansen Medaille.