62 results

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Facade Games featured image

    Facade Games

    This paper provides an overview of a course focusing on the façade as taught to architecture students over a twenty-year period. The need for this s…

  • 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…

  • Developments in Gridshell Design

    In 1959 Heinz Isler challenged the world of concrete shell design by proposing a series of shapes for shells that were very different from what most …

  • APT Seattle Conference Symposium 2023: Aging Composite Materials and Assemblies

    Aging modern heritage buildings and structures face complex repair and reinvestment challenges. Manufactured composite materials and multi-material assemblies often cannot be cost-effectively repaired or replaced in kind.

  • Facing Density

    The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs projects a world population growth of over three billion over our current, nearly eight …

  • The Tectonics of Flimsiness

    Architecture has traditionally celebrated the joining of two building components or materials. Joinery serves as a key site for architectural express…

  • 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 redu…

  • Renewing Two Saarinen Icons

    Kresge Auditorium and the MIT Chapel, designed by Eero Saarinen and built in 1955, are both world renowned works of architecture and powerful symbols…

  • Doubling Mies

    Mies van der Rohe’s concurrently designed projects for Commonwealth Promenade Apartments (1953-1956) and the Esplanade Apartments (1953-1957), saw th…

  • Teaching Facades

    As facades become more sophisticated and complex, more detail-intensive and performance-critical, it's vital that architecture students develop a dee…

  • Pioneering the Structural Terracotta Mullion Façade

    Architects today must explore alternative enclosure materials to meet evolving energy codes and embodied carbon regulations. Terra cotta has been mos…

  • Nested Density featured image

    Nested Density

    Projecting imagery onto building facades is not only becoming a marketing necessity for successful urban spectacles but is also altering social urban…

  • Vertical Louvered Solar Control

    Exterior shading devices, when typically used, are horizontal planes that are most effective at the south face of buildings in the northern hemispher…

  • Autonomous or Appropriate

    This paper examines two profoundly different design approaches: one, herein called ‘autonomous’, where the building’s design is governed by internal …

  • 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…

  • 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 ven…

  • The Myth of Simplicity featured image

    The Myth of Simplicity

    There were good why reasons early US Modernism first evolved in California– wide open sites with no constraints (physical or zoning), and effectively…