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?” …
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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 lives…
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Structuring Skin
Curtain wall is the prevailing type of enclosure on modern buildings because of its economy, its independence from structure that allows flexibility …
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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 abili…
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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 arch…
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PLEA 2020 Online
PLEA stands for “Passive and Low Energy Architecture”, a commitment to the development, documentation and diffusion of the principles of bioclimatic design and the application of natural and innovative techniques for sustainable architecture and urban design.
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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 objec…
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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 ti…
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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 con…
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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 wa…
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ANFA 2021 Call for Presenters
The ANFA Conference will explore, from a scientific basis, the range of human experiences that occur in context with elements of architecture, both exterior and interior. Abstracts will be accepted until February 28, 2021.
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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 en…
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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 Re…
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Exploring Heritage: Building on the Past
Welcome to this edition of the SKINS newsletter, which is all about carbon! As guest editor this month, I am representing FTI’s embodied carbon (EC) working group. This issue highlights several important topics relative to embodied and the trade-offs with operational carbon.
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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…
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Connecting Composites to Sustainability: Probabilistic LCA, Industrialized Construction, and Digital Twinning
Material flows of the fossil fuel industry, from exploration and extraction to distribution and combustion, are massive on a global scale. In 2019, the world produced approximately 80 million barrels of crude oil per day, with most being used as a feedstock for combustible fuels.
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Adaptive Building Envelope
Designing a multi-functional building envelope as an architectural façade, environmental interface and solar collector is a multi-objective explorati…
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Algorithmic Patterns for Facade Design
Recently, building envelopes have been exhibiting complex shapes and patterns, a trend supported by current digital technologies. Likewise, the desig…
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Next normal: Advanced composites for a changing industry
This issue of SKINS will attempt to introduce you to composite materials in an accurate, useful and fairly in-depth way. But it’s only an introduction; it’s a start but by no means a rigorous exploration of the full potential of this remarkable material technology.
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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 ultra-thi…