ETFE Membrane Envelope Strategies

We as a species have been aware for some time now that our actions have a large and lasting impact on this planet. From the first photos of our ‘pale blue dot’ to the high-definition veins and clusters of light stretching across the earth's surface, humans have made a home for ourselves with our structures and transportation networks. Our building techniques have changed over millennia in accordance with our lifestyles; from early bone huts, to portable tent structures, stone castles, wood tract homes and aluminum, steel, and glass skyscrapers. The goal has been pretty much the same, seeking comfort from the elements.

As our construction methods have evolved, there continues to be somewhat of a transitory mentality to our buildings, which has only been exacerbated by the general culture of conspicuous consumption. Commodity construction has taken hold over the last 100+ years, unlike our predecessors in the nomadic tents who could easily deploy and dismantle their architecture reusing the same material, or the stone structures which, though more permanent, were carefully tended to and maintained over centuries and still stand to this day. Today we build, then 15-30 years later we demolish and build something new. The construction methodologies of the building industry in the last 100 years, coupled with exponential population, and the belief that buildings have a designated lifespan has created an interesting problem and one of the highest contributing factors to global carbon emissions.

Our built environment takes up a relatively small footprint of the earth's surface but our buildings (in material and operations) contribute to approximately 40% of all the global emissions (Hamilton et al., 2020) . Much of the focus on building energy and performance in the last 20 years has been on the high-rise towers in the urban centers of US cities, both commercial and residential, and though this is an extremely important building category, we estimate that the single family detached home takes 68% more land area and 12% more total building square footage on average than its high-rise counterpart. Here we have an opportunity to look at how we can find ways of retrofitting not only existing high rises but also single-family homes to become more energy efficient and carbon neutral.

We have an opportunity to blend old techniques and new materials to approach the single-family home and high-rise building typologies in different ways. The focus of this paper is to offer new insights from our design research of membrane based cladding strategies rather than presenting a complete and comprehensive study for performance upgrade strategies of the US building stock. With that, we ask the questions:

• What might it look like if a developer tract home was wrapped in a skin of ETFE (Ethylene Tetrafluoro-Ethylene) pillows to reduce winter heating and passively cool in the summer?
• Could a 1960’s high-rise office tower become a passive kinetic façade of stretched ETFE with increased ventilation, reducing air-conditioning and heating seasonally, while being one of the most carbon lean solutions and still honor the original architecture?
  

The authors thank the sponsoring organizations Solar Decathlon China 2021, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Thomas Jefferson University, Zhejiang University-University of Illinois Urbana Champaign Joint Institute, and industry partners GCL Nanotech, Taohuajiang, and Flying Architecture. We also thank professional advisors Kewei Liu (INBAR), Changqi Ma (CAS), Petra Stanev and Ryan Lohbauer (Stanev Potts), Alex Worden and Audrey Worden (StudioTJOA), John Shields (PointB Design), Matt Naugle (New Hudson Facades), Bjoern Beckert (Fabritecture), Florian Meier (Knippers Helbig), Matthew Cleary (Saint Gobin). All images of the SDC 2021 project case study are credited to Y-Team faculty and student team members who participated in developing this project.

Hamilton, I., Kennard, H., Rapf, O., Kockat, J., and Zuhaib, S. (2020), 2020 Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction, https://globalabc.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/2020%20Buildings%20GSR_FULL%20REPORT.pdf

Martinez Arias, Andrea & Patterson, Mic & Carlson, Anders & Noble, Douglas. (2015). Fundamentals in Façade Retrofit Practice. Procedia Engineering.

Wilson, E, Christensen, C., Horowitz, S., Robertson, J., and Maguire, J. (2017) Energy Efficiency Potential in the U.S. Single-Family Housing Stock, National Renewable Energy Laboratory