Air Spaces Changed Everything

This abstract proposes that architectural facade design over the last 60 years has convulsed in light of two disruptions: air spaces which create veneer facades and parametric software, locating any point in space, connecting dots to describe a surface.

Rainscreen principles are now ubiquitous in modern envelopes almost anyplace normal temperatures range beyond natural human comfort. Although all layers of a rain screen assembly contribute to its performance, the critical aesthetic component of this system is the most ephemeral: a zone of air allows the temperature and atmospheric pressure behind the epidermis to match the exterior conditions beyond it.

Parametric software has freed the humble airspace to evolve from the 25mm (1”) wafer in a layering of flat components to a space of any dimension varying from the minimal 25mm to many metres, even undulating within a wall, in service of limitlessly complex geometries. In many cases, these flamboyant forms are attained as ‘blocks’ or ‘chunks’ - as named by Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake in Refabricating Architecture - which are built on a shop floor and assembled on site. The only necessary construction considerations are practical assembly on-site and occasional dismantling.

Now, anything that is not water-soluble or prone to freezing can be a facade.

With no real need to select materials for their intrinsic qualities to create a habitable shell, all the composition rules are gone. Almost anything works. Using stone in a facade is no more about its inherent qualities of compressive strength or imperviousness than a piece of William Morris wallpaper is about the paper - everything is all just durable wallpaper. Is an aluminum panel about aluminum, or a shape or a graphic composition, or hopefully both?

Everything one sees now is a visual material reference to support a design composition treatise – surface materials, in many cases, don’t matter to envelope performance.

As materials suppliers strive for ever-thinner, lighter skin components, the real, technically and materially disciplined envelope is beneath, out of view. Materials do matter behind the form-giving air space, where enormous research investments support marketing of improved energy performance and coping with ever-tougher government standards.

This abstract proposes to discuss how we express/manipulate facades in an era of virtually no material thickness, supported with historic design agendas and historic background going back a century and a half.