70 results

  • Kinetics in Building Facades featured image

    Kinetics in Building Facades

    The prominence of climatically responsive building facades through the use of kinetics has proliferated in recent years due to a concern for the…
  • The Evolution of AEC Professional Silos featured image

    The Evolution of AEC Professional Silos

    Healthcare projects in northern California require specialized knowledge to navigate regulation, technological advancements, and project execution…
  • Parametric Facade Design featured image

    Parametric Facade Design

    Parametric Design has become an invaluable tool for complex tasks like designing energy efficient buildings when joined to performance-based…
  • Realizing Bespoke Structural Glass Facades featured image

    Realizing Bespoke Structural Glass Facades

    In the very earliest stages of a design, an architect imagines a unique glazed facade form and wonders, “Is this possible?” and “What will it cost?”…
  • Bringing an Icon Into the Future: Willis Tower featured image

    Bringing an Icon Into the Future: Willis Tower

    Few buildings are as iconic as Willis Tower. Generations of Chicagoans have a collective memory of this building playing a role in their entire…
  • Structuring Skin featured image

    Structuring Skin

    Curtain wall is the prevailing type of enclosure on modern buildings because of its economy, its independence from structure that allows flexibility…
  • Thinking About Facades featured image

    Thinking About Facades

    There have been three decades of liberating developments in the application of descriptive geometry and freeform design methods, as well as the…
  • Modern Heritage and Facade Improvements featured image

    Modern Heritage and Facade Improvements

    Approximately 80% of our total building stock is from the 20th century. During the last decades, along with an increasing appreciation of modern…
  • Reduce, Reuse, Reclad featured image

    Reduce, Reuse, Reclad

    Kintsukuroi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with powdered precious metal, is a practice of celebrating the life and history of an…
  • Inside the Box

    The trend towards modular and unitized facades continues to grow in popularity due largely in part to the efficiencies gained in terms of cost and

  • Multi Layer Facades featured image

    Multi Layer Facades

    The history of high performance facades and glazing has been a tale of attempting to manage the conflicting requirements of, on one hand inviting…
  • Saving Face featured image

    Saving Face

    In 1871, a fourth level Architecture course was offered in New York City that instructed on topics such as heating, ventilation and circulation of…
  • Form as Energy

    All too often, high-performance building envelopes are considered in terms of new materials and technologies that push specific systems to improve

  • The First Triple Certified Facade

    Johnson Controls (JCI), a leading provider of intelligent building technology solicited the design of a 35,000sm headquarters for its Asia-Pacific

  • Localized Rigidification of PCM Envelopes featured image

    Localized Rigidification of PCM Envelopes

    This is an experimental and computational exploration of structural systems that transform between states of rigidity and flexibility. The goal is to…
  • Adaptive Building Envelope featured image

    Adaptive Building Envelope

    Designing a multi-functional building envelope as an architectural façade, environmental interface and solar collector is a multi-objective…
  • Algorithmic Patterns for Facade Design

    Recently, building envelopes have been exhibiting complex shapes and patterns, a trend supported by current digital technologies. Likewise, the

  • Prototyping with Ultra-Thin Glass featured image

    Prototyping with Ultra-Thin Glass

    This paper proposes system concepts and fabrication methods for the use of ultra-thin glass in facades. It documents the team's research on…
  • Catalytic Conversion

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