Set on the corner of Swanston and Victoria streets, Melbourne, the RMIT Design Hub brings together top design academics, industry practitioners and postgraduate researchers in a cross-disciplinary collaborative hub. Planned as an urban research laboratory, the building is enveloped in a smart skin that has been designed as a climate-responsive organism, engineered by the Permasteelisa Group. Its translucent outer skin is made up of more than sixteen thousand sand-blasted glass cells, which become transparent in the rain. Sections of the cells automatically track the sun to help provide shade, and when future technology allows, they will help power the building. The inner skin is a high-performance, double-glazed layer; but this description just scratches the surface of the building’s ecological design.