Kiki&Joost Designs Alternative Solar Panels With Natural Textures

In these times of eco-anxiety, members of the A&D community are looking to move away from fossil-fuel dependence. Kiki&Joost Design Studio partners Kiki van Eijk and Joost van Bleiswijk have provided an option: attractive solar panels that attach to a building’s face, instead of the utilitarian arrays amassed on rooftops. But the Dutch designers didn’t discard the roof version entirely. Manufactured by MyEnergySkin, the collection’s eight models offer six styles of 2-by-4-foot facade modules and two of 1 1/2-by-2-foot roof tiles, all in textured tempered glass. “It started with them,” van Bleiswijk says of the original 1980’s arrays, “but it’s the facade that’s the highlight of a building.” Adds van Eijk: “We relied on aesthetics to make our tiles feel natural,” which is reinforced with such pattern names as Leaves and Rain and achieved by spraying, brushing, or dripping acid on metals, scanning and repeating the results, then applying them to glass. Soon, modules patterned in Scratch will clad Kiki&Joost’s newly built Eindhoven studio.

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