Retrofit Options for Historic Facades
Building design criteria requires that government buildings be designed for a variety of extreme loads including blast, hurricane, and impact conditi…
24 results
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Sustainable Retrofit Strategies for an Existing Laboratory Building
This paper analyzes sustainable retrofit strategies for an existing research laboratory building, located in a cold climate. This facility is compose…
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Challenges of Tall Iconic Building Retrofit
Change happens, for better or for worse, to all living and physical matter. In order to thrive and achieve longevity, we constantly need to adapt to …
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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…
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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…
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Exo-Skins
Cost-effective, sustainable, self-actuating, thermally-responsive, bio-composite exo-skins that act like shields or cloaks for existing buildings cou…
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Detailing For Distance
Quickly exceeding new facade service life expectations for tall buildings imposed by increasing environmental, economic, and social pressures have cr…
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Adaptable Glazing Shields
Today, about 40% of all buildings in the U.S. still have single-pane windows, and ~70% of the existing building stock is estimated to suffer from und…
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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…
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Impact Of Thermal Bridges On The Energy Response Of A Building
The European building stock is mainly constituted by highly energy demanding buildings. The only way to a more sustainable and decarbonized building …
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Optimized Adaptive Re-Use
Contemporary building practice represents a disconnect between traditional manufacturing techniques, that favor straight runs and orthogonal geometri…
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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…
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Doubling Mies
Mies van der Rohe’s concurrently designed projects for Commonwealth Promenade Apartments (1953-1956) and the Esplanade Apartments (1953-1957), saw th…
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Carbon Lean Facades
With net zero and carbon neutral mandates on the near horizon, New York City has pushed the green building envelope by leveraging incentive-based pro…
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Innovative Façades for a Sustainable Architecture
Facades play a relevant role in the search for a more sustainable approach to modern architecture. The amount of embodied and operational energy can …
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Vintage Vinyl
Mid-century through 1980’s buildings with lock-strip or “zipper-gasket” glazing systems are an ever present part of the urban landscape in many citie…
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Passively Actuated Systems
Kinetic or responsive facades have been developed to improve buildings' daylighting conditions while mitigating energy consumption. Still, these faca…
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ETFE Membrane Envelope Strategies
Airflow within the cavity of double-skin facades is a key component of adaptive building envelopes which change thermophysical properties to meet cha…
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Slipping through the Cracks
We construct building enclosures to keep the elements out, but sometimes air and water infiltrate the building envelope, causing several problems for…
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Seismic Movements
A common building upgrade to add value to existing commercial real estate is the renewal of the entrance lobby. The lobby facade is replaced to give …