62 results

  • Carbon-Neutral High-Rise Envelope Nexus

    The pathway to carbon-neutrality, as urged during the COP 21 in Paris, and the repeated goal for resilient buildings and urban habitats, winds right …

  • Passive House Facade Design and Construction featured image

    Passive House Facade Design and Construction

    Buildings account for over 40% of global emissions (GlobalABC, 2018). Growing populations and higher standards of living are increasing pressure on t…

  • A Compact, Unitized Double Skin Facade featured image

    A Compact, Unitized Double Skin Facade

    Driven by an increasing demand for high thermal and acoustic performance, transparency, and low maintenance costs, a number of facade innovations hav…

  • Designing with Photovoltaics featured image

    Designing with Photovoltaics

    Photovoltaics (PV) have been utilized in buildings for decades, especially in Europe where legislative support has largely driven the market. With ne…

  • Lightning Protection as Building Envelope

    A building’s envelope mitigates the effects of meteorological phenomena – including lightning – upon the structure and its occupants and contents. Th…

  • Corrugated-geometry Copper and Glass Facade

    The subject of this case study is the design and construction of a custom corrugated-geometry facade featuring pre-patinated copper and glass for an …

  • Ginza Six featured image

    Ginza Six

    Tokyo’s prestigious Ginza District, is home to innovative architectural design. One of the most recent examples is Ginza Six (GSIX), the largest comm…

  • Heat-actuated Auxetic Facades featured image

    Heat-actuated Auxetic Facades

    Highly transformable materials can be used as adaptive exterior shading systems by leveraging the relationship between external stimuli (heat) and re…

  • Anisotropic Effects in Architectural Glass

    Iridescence effects, quench marks, leopard marks… The names given to optical anisotropy in toughened and heat-strengthened glass are diverse and wide…

  • Reinforced Polymer Concrete Screen Walls featured image

    Reinforced Polymer Concrete Screen Walls

    Apertures is a six-story, commercial building in the Roma Norte neighborhood of Mexico City–a neighborhood severely impacted by the 1985 and 2017 ear…

  • Fire Safety and Code Challenges for Mass Timber in Curtain Wall Systems featured image

    Fire Safety and Code Challenges for Mass Timber in Curtain Wall Systems

    With the desire for more sustainable construction and reduced embodied energy, mass timber is being explored for building structures. For medium and …

  • Facade Mock-ups featured image

    Facade Mock-ups

    Curtain walls and window walls are typically specified to meet a variety of different performance and testing criteria, some of which can be quite st…

  • Design Principles For Museum Daylight Systems featured image

    Design Principles For Museum Daylight Systems

    This research unlocks the relationship between space, structure and light in nine unique museums developed by architect Renzo Piano. Renzo Piano uses…

  • The Double Skin Facade

    The largest source of air pollution in North America is the atmospheric boundary layer of a city caused by its urban canyons with pollutants produced…

  • 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.…

  • Carbon-Dioxide-Inhaling Facade

    3.5 billion years ago, cyanobacteria created the foundation for life on Earth by producing the oxygen basis for our atmosphere. Should we once again …