31 results

  • 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…

  • Developments in Gridshell Design featured image

    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 …

  • Xilinx Case Study featured image

    Xilinx Case Study

    The transformation of a dark and inhumane 1970s tilt-up concrete office building into a high performance, light-filled modern workplace was enabled b…

  • Paul Rudolph's Christian Science Building

    This paper presents new historical research on the concrete facade of an important but relatively unknown and now demolished building by the American…

  • Lightweight Veneer in High-rise Unitized Facades featured image

    Lightweight Veneer in High-rise Unitized Facades

    Manufactured veneer panels such as glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC), ultra high performance concrete (UHPC), sintered stone, and terracotta are…

  • 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 Carapace Pavilion featured image

    The Carapace Pavilion

    The Carapace Pavilion is a university-based, design-build, full-scale custom prototype for a possible replacement of the standard precast concrete to…

  • Terracotta 1912 to 2018 featured image

    Terracotta 1912 to 2018

    Center Three is a 100-year-old, one million square-foot building in Long Island City, New York that was constructed over the course of one year. It w…

  • Hardened Facades Effects on Structural Systems featured image

    Hardened Facades Effects on Structural Systems

    To ensure the safety of U.S diplomatic personnel overseas, the U.S Department of State (DoS) has developed facade retrofits capable of resisting high…

  • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston featured image

    Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

    Steven Holl Architects designed two new buildings in the Museum District in Houston, Texas. Knippers Helbig is the facade consultant of both projects…

  • Transitions Between Diverse Envelope Systems

    The Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California features an extremely diverse set of facade systems within one…

  • 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 …

  • Doubling Mies

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

  • Ceramic Precast Composite Panels featured image

    Ceramic Precast Composite Panels

    An innovative lightweight ceramic precast composite panel is introduced in this paper that offers the unique benefits of prefabricated off-site const…

  • Optimized Adaptive Re-Use featured image

    Optimized Adaptive Re-Use

    Contemporary building practice represents a disconnect between traditional manufacturing techniques, that favor straight runs and orthogonal geometri…

  • The Butterfly featured image

    The Butterfly

    Providing a unique and integral cladding/envelope solution suited for high-rise buildings has been an inherent challenge for this building typology s…

  • When Facades Kill

    The tragic fire of June 14, 2017 at the Grenfell Tower in London, England has brought to a very public global forum issues related to the impact of f…

  • Preserving a Historic Facade

    Environmental and socio-economic benefits of sustainable preservation have become apparent most recently in the restoration of the historic former Ma…

  • Low-Carbon Cladding and Shading Design

    In the last few years, the design community has embraced the challenge of reducing embodied carbon in buildings. Several tools are now available for …

  • The Seismic Capability of Curtainwalls

    The testing of aluminum/glass curtainwalls for seismic capability, mainly inter-story drift, has been carried out on many curtainwalls over the last …