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Building facades and skins are the most important components in enhancing the building's aesthetics and attractiveness. Over the past decades, digital technologies have provided architects with tools that helped create designs characterized by richness, diversity, and formal complexity while addressing environmental performance. This paper deals with building skins that depend on formal patterns and elements as a basis for their designs and focuses on exploring the aspects responsible for their formal diversity. The research relies on previous studies and contemporary realistic designs to extrapolate the characteristics affecting formal diversity. The paper identifies the most important diversifying features, such as the sources of intellectual inspiration for the skin designs, the relationship of the skin to the structure, the characteristics of the geometric form for both the building's surface and skin and the number of skins used. The formal variations among building skins have mostly resulted from the geometric form of skin elements and their distribution method. In addition, some skin elements are changeable by adopting formal transformations such as scaling, bending, twisting, and expanding; or they are movable according to specific forces. Finally, the impact of the building materials used on the formation of buildings’ skins is highlighted, especially the features of rigidity, flexibility, smartness, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools are the functional type that includes several requirements and standards related to the conceptual, design, constructional and operational aspects. These standards consist of various factors with minimum and maximum values to which the design must adhere. In recent years, Iraqi schools suffer from overcrowding and insufficient facilities. The research problem has identified as the contradiction between the Iraqi standards for schools and the existing schools in terms of the capacity of students, number of classes, available facilities, etc. In addition, the existing school buildings ignore the differences in design specifications related to the student ages and their academic levels. In fact, the same design typology of school was used for different stages of study (primary, intermediate, and secondary), which led to the incompatibility with their requirements. Therefore, this paper seeks to present a methodology for modifying the design parameters of each school type to satisfy the minimum requirements of each study stage facilities. To achieve this aim, the paper adopts building information modelling (BIM) to represent a model for the design standards of educational facilities, and to facilitate the handling of different information, such as descriptive, quantitative, and qualitative values. The digital parametric model of school was built to represent the design constraints and the maximum and minimum limits of the Iraqi standards for school, and to provide the necessary flexibility to change the values within the permissible limits of the standard. This model was implemented using different software tools such as Revit, Planfinder and Grasshopper for Rhino to represent the information of schools in the Iraqi Standards. A methodology for adapting the typical school designs based on the concept of BIM and parametric programming was implemented to generate new designs by adding new spaces or changing the dimensions of existing spaces. The results proved the validity of this method in the derivation of feasible designs by adapting the typical school's designs approved by the Iraqi Ministry of Education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]