Kayne Horsham knew he was on to something when the suits he made were given a nickname. It was around the turn of the millennium and Horsham was working in his native New Zealand producing what was to become the blockbuster three-film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. As art director of the creatures, armor, and weapons department, Horsham was tasked with finding ways to outfit the movies’ plethora of hobbits, wizards, elves, and dwarves. In practice, this means creating a lot of chain mail armor.
Chain mail, a sheath of intricately interwoven metal rings, dates back over 2,000 years to knights and warriors in ancient Europe. For the films, which are set in a fictional world where a group embarks on a dangerous quest, chain mail was a major part of the costume. “It was, ‘here’s a sketch, here’s the characters, here’s the budget, here’s the date, figure out how we’ll get there with the physical side,'” Horsham says.
Horsham developed a version of chainmail made not of heavy metal but of light and airy polypropylene plastic. It looked the part without weighing down the actors wearing it, but it took about 1,000 hours per shirt to produce by hand. The actors were so impressed with Horsham’s ingenuity and craftsmanship that they dubbed the armor Kaynemaile, after its creator.
Horsham saw the potential to turn this ingenuity into a business. He figured that the one-off costumes he helped create for the movies could just as easily be scaled up to serve as one-off fabrics for high-end tailoring. He started talking with big names in the fashion industry, including Gucci, and got an order for 100,000 square feet of stuff, a massively larger amount than was produced for the film. Horsham realized that if he wanted it to work, he would have to invest in automating production. He also realized that the fickle fashion industry might not want his bespoke chainmail gear forever, and that there might be more enduring customers in other industries.
He then turned to the discreet world of building facades. Now, more than two decades after making his new chainmail on the sets of Lord of the Rings films, Horsham has industrialized the material for use on buildings around the world. His company – named, yes, Kaynemaile – has transformed film costume armor into a sleek, flowing and surprisingly durable mesh material that is used by designers to augment their buildings, both outdoors and indoors. interior.
“I understood the design process and the fact that architects sit in a unique position where they look to the future and want to understand the technologies that can help them get there,” says Horsham.
Kaynemaile acts as a flowing, curtain-like element on buildings ranging from parking lots to museums to private residences, providing a kinetic surface that moves in the wind and catches the eye. Manufactured by injection moulding, the chainmail rings have no joints and are strong, light and resistant to fire and ultraviolet rays. And as Horsham discovered by accident, the material is also surprisingly good at keeping the buildings it encases cool. Kaynemaile was being installed in a parking lot in Australia on an extremely hot day, and Horhsam says his team started noticing that when a piece of hardware went up, the surrounding area felt cooler. “We started taking measurements on the concrete and seeing a significant drop in temperature,” he says.
Further research was conducted and Kaynemaile found that the interconnected rings create a structure that effectively blocks 70% of the sun while allowing 80% of the air to flow through the sheath. “We’re like a louver system where the air passes through three-dimensional density but not the light, so we can reduce the solar energy gain but allow almost 100% of the air movement to flow around the building,” he said. “Here we promote it as a facade material, but there is more.”
It is an increasingly attractive material for architects and builders who wish to increase the comfort of their spaces through passive technologies. Sam Rosenthal is an architect with Schooley Caldwell, an architecture firm based in Columbus, Ohio, and he led the design of a parking lot project there that used Kaynemaile as a decorative, kinetic facade treatment designed by artist Ned Kahn . “If it was made of metal, I don’t think it would be possible. It just wouldn’t get that ripple, that puffiness effect,” says Rosenthal. “What’s really remarkable about this material is how relatively light it is.” He always has the conceptual model of the project next to his desk.
Horsham sees the material’s cooling potential as proof that it’s more than just a facade. He also recently adapted the ingredient to make the material, collaborating with the chemical company Covestro to use a biopolymer composed of 88% non-fossil components. The two companies hope to push this to 100%, which Horhsam says would allow the chainmail material to be fully circular in the sense that it can be cut down to its component parts and remade over and over again. The climate crisis calls for this kind of approach to material production, Horsham says, especially in the carbon-intensive building industry. His reusable, building-cooling chain mail, born in the movies, shows “the power of the ring,” he says.