108 results
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Resilient SKINS: Bending with the Wind
Are you resilient? Do you bend to the winds of change or do you resist? Do you bounce back from adversity or is your recovery long, slow, and incomplete? Do you readily adopt lifestyle changes in response to personal health, economic, or environmental challenges, or is your response one of denial?
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Stop F*cking Around – Build Our Zero Carbon Economy Now
To avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis, we urgently need to reduce carbon emissions now. But that's not enough! This original article for SKINS by Drew Shula is a veritable manifesto on the why and how of climate action for all of us.
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Curb Your Carbon, Knave!
A question for architects and building industry: Can our cities be part of the solution to the challenges facing humanity, or are they intrinsically and inevitably a big part of the problem? To move beyond the latter demands nothing less than a fundamental shift in the way we think about buildings.
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2023 Vitruvian Awards
The first Vitruvian Honors & Awards program took place in 2021. The virtual program highlights the finalists in each project category.
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Form Follows Well-Being: An Approach to Human Centric Facade Design
Professor Timo Schmidt and Research Assistant David Bjelland of the University of Applied Sciences, Augsburg, propose a human centric planning guide for façade design that provides a tool to optimize façade components to match enhanced occupant well-being and health.
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Kinetic Solar Envelope Design
Authors Christina Koukelli, Arup, Alejandro Prieto, Diego Portales University, and Serdar Asut, TU Delft, address the potentials of Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs) for the design of autoreactive facade systems without using additional energy.
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Reconfigurable Terracotta Facades
This study, completed by an interdisciplinary team from the University of Buffalo and Alfred University explores a thermal mass application using terracotta blocks that can be reconfigured for different seasons.
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Printed Facades? Cases of Additive Manufacturing in the Building Envelope
This paper, written by a team at the Technical University at Darmstadt, uses examples of 3D printed structural glass, reinforced thin-sheet façade panels, and nesting bricks that can be integrated directly into facades to support work successful industrial applications.
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Thermal Bridging and Building Facades
Ivan Lee, a Building Science Consultant at Morrison Hershfield recognizes the importance of mitigating thermal bridging to meet low energy targets for buildings. He points out that many jurisdictions are starting to incorporate thermal bridging into their codes and standards
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Toward Net Zero Enclosures
Gensler architects Jessica Santonastaso and Alan Estabrook survey existing research on embodied carbon in exterior wall assemblies and the availability of product declarations for relevant materials.
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Façade Resilience Evaluation Framework
This paper discusses façade resilience and presents a novel qualitative evaluation framework that assesses potential risks associated with façade design and suggests way of reducing such design risk in a climate change scenario. Authors Fabio Favoino, Adèle Chalumeau, and Audrey Aquaronne.
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Rethinking Building Skins
Authors and educators Eugenia Gasparri, Arianna Brambilla, Gabriele Lobaccaro, Francesco Goia, Annalisa Andaloro, and Alberto Sangiorgio address the major challenges and opportunities ahead for the construction (and façade) sector, with a focus on product and process innovations.
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Looking Back at the 2022 World Congress
The 2022 World Congress was special in many ways, but first on everyone’s list was the opportunity to be together on October 12 and 13 in Los Angeles. Our previous World Congress in 2020 was held online due to the global pandemic.
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Plant-based Architecture and Living Facades: The Intersection of Biology and the Building Skin
A question for architects and building industry: Can our cities be part of the solution to the challenges facing humanity, or are they intrinsically and inevitably a big part of the problem? To move beyond the latter demands nothing less than a fundamental shift in the way we think about buildings.
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Biofacades: Integrating Biological Systems with Building Enclosures
Biofacades integrate biological systems into building enclosures. This article introduces performance benefits, challenges, and taxonomies for different forms of building-nature integration. Beyond green walls, other forms of living matter such as algae and myceli
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Fenestration Challenges
The May SKINS newsletter focuses on fenestration, that is – windows, curtainwall, storefront, glazed doors and skylights. There are very few structures that are built without these elements, not just because they are so crucial for occupant health and well-being.
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Reflections on Views
Lisa Heschong, a keynote speaker at the Facade Tectonics Institute’s World Congress in October, is a strong proponent for the importance of daylighting and views in all types of buildings, including this excerpt from her recent book, Visual Design in Architecture: Daylight, Vision, and View.
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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.
