As the interactive interface between indoor and outdoor environment, the building skin is an important system to alleviate the adverse impact of outdoor environment and respond to the users’ comfort demand, which has a significant impact on the building performance. The researches on intelligent building skins are of great significance for the implementation of energy conservation and pollution emissions reduction strategies and the construction of ecological civilization cities. Under the restriction of energy efficiency design standards, the carbon emission of the existed building envelope in cold areas is large, the cost is high, the dynamic fluctuation of outdoor environment and the potential of response to the demand of indoor users are insufficient, which restricts the improvement range of green performance of buildings in cold areas. With the development of artificial intelligence technology and the improvement of the quality of living environment, the building skin in cold regions presents an intelligent evolution trend. The paper aims to analyze the internal industrial demand of the intelligent evolution of building skin in cold regions and the external technical thrust in the context of artificial intelligence, and concludes the development of the building smart skins and discusses the keypoint scientific and technical questions. This paper reviews the research on building epidermis intelligence and analyzes the landmark achievements and engineering practice explorations in the evolution process of building epidermis intelligence. Further from the dynamic shape finding, efficient transmission and intelligent control three aspects of the evolution of intelligent development of building epidermis in the cold regions, it illustrates the science and technology issuse, so as to expand the theory and method system of building epidermis design, improve the level of building epidermis intelligence, as well as promote the transformation of building industry information. This paper is composed of 4 sections. Firstly, it analyzed the industry requirement for the intelligent evolutionary of building skins in cold regions and pointed out that the building skin played an active role in energy efficiency and pollution emissions reduction, the construction of healthy and comfortable living environment, and the improvement of green performance. Meanwhile, the study demonstrated that the application of the artificial intelligence technology, such as natural language processing, computer vision, biometrics and human-computer interaction in building adaptive skins is a promising way to solve the bottleneck problem in building design. Secondly, it reviewed the symbolic achievements and engineering practice exploration during the development of the intelligent evolution process of building skins intelligence. Since the 1960s, the intelligent evolution of building skin has gone through many stages, and gradually expanded into a multidisciplinary interdisciplinary research field for the demand of building multi green performance optimization, and evolved into kinetic architecture, climate adaptive skin and other building intelligent skin design theories and methods, and under the demand of contemporary construction industry and the thrust of artificial intelligence technology, it presents a diversified development trend. Further combined with the climate characteristics of cold regions and the main contradiction between buildings and environment in cold regions, the study analyzed the positive and negative cases of the evolution of intelligent development of building epidermis in the cold regions of science and technology issues from the dynamic shape finding, efficient transmission and intelligent control, so as to expand the theory and method system of building epidermis design, improve the level of building epidermis intelligence, and promote the transformation of building industry information. The results showed that in the aspect of dynamic shape finding, the building skin in cold regions should have a certain spatial structure to flexibly respond to the influence of environmental factors such as sunshine and radiation, and the dynamic feature of building smart skin shape should be fully considered in the design based on the dynamic nature of environmental information. In the aspect of efficient transmission, we should pay attention to the influence of low temperature environment on the implementability, weatherability and reliability of building skin transmission structure. In the aspect of intelligent control, the skin of buildings in cold areas should focus on the influence of composite daylight and thermal impacts to improve the indoor visual and thermal comfort of buildings in cold areas through responding to the sunshine radiation environment. In future, the researches on the adaptive skins for building in cold regions could expand the design theory and method system of building skins, and promote the transformation of building industry informatization.