48 results

  • Iconic Buildings

    The iconic building principal incentive is to be visually attractive or stand out, for this purpose three main features must be accomplished: have a …

  • Adaptive Reuse of Industrial Heritage Façades

    With the developments in production, industrial facilities lost their function and were abandoned over time. The most frequent and often the most sus…

  • Digital Enablement for Manufacturing featured image

    Digital Enablement for Manufacturing

    Architectural design freedom achieved on high-end projects currently costs over $1,000/sq. Ft. Building materials have long been relegated to plane s…

  • Catalytic Conversion

    Nowadays, the power of images is seductive. Bold and complex facades often have an innovative appearance but superficial tectonic depth; experiential…

  • City Development and Cladding Design

    High-rise buildings in growing cities could become more vulnerable to variations in wind flow due to the continuous changes in urban topology. The ae…

  • Spandrel Glass Design

    Currently, most spandrel glass in commercial curtain walls comprises insulating glass fabricated using an interior heat strengthened glass lite that …

  • Façade Systems and Embodied Carbon

    Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodology used to quantify the impact of building construction supply chains on the environment in terms of measur…

  • Environmental Facade Perspective

    Designing a sustainable rainscreen wall assembly has become an essential part of most new construction projects. Industry principles and energy codes…

  • Facade Resilience Evaluation Framework featured image

    Facade Resilience Evaluation Framework

    Resiliency is the capacity of a building (or building component in the case of the facade) to support building functionalities during extreme events …

  • More Than a Facade

    In 2014, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) approved the Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute (PCI) as an accredited ANSI Standards D…

  • The Craft of Building Enclosures

    This paper will provide case studies of two high-performance building envelopes in the San Francisco Bay Area where the fabrication of bespoke façade…

  • Modeling Megapanels

    Large format, steel-stud framed “megapanel” facades with rainscreen cladding create uniquely complicated requirements for digital documentation and 3…

  • Silicone Spandrel Glass Opacifiers

    Curtain wall design commonly uses insulating glass units for vision and spandrel glazing to provide better visual harmonization of building facade gl…

  • Climate-Oriented Prefabricated Building Envelopes

    Facades developed in response to climactic factors increase performance and human comfort while reducing energy loads. A single building envelope wil…

  • Working With Big Data

    Big data is having a noticeable impact on enclosure engineering design. With continuing advancements that liberate the geometrical form and the incre…

  • Patchwork

    It may be difficult for modern man to believe that what is known as handicraft was once the advanced manufacturing of the day. These techniques were …

  • Shadow Box Design

    Shadow boxes are commonly used in curtain wall construction, but can be problematic if not designed and detailed correctly and appropriately for the …

  • Fire Safety in High Rise Exterior Facades

    One of the most complex yet least understood areas where fire can spread is at the perimeter of a building. Fire can not only spread from floor-to-fl…

  • Novel Techniques for Facade Optimization

    Complex freeform architectural enclosures are becoming increasingly popular and easy to model and design with the help of modern computational tools.…