Historical Evolution of Responsive Facades
Responsive facade system is considered a major component of high-performance building envelope that is capable of responding to environmental stimuli…
19 results
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Renewing Historic Facades
As the first phase of a $4 billion dollar, 180-acre, 60 building government preservation project in Washington DC, this case study reviews the envelo…
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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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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…
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Nested Density
Projecting imagery onto building facades is not only becoming a marketing necessity for successful urban spectacles but is also altering social urban…
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Autonomous or Appropriate
This paper examines two profoundly different design approaches: one, herein called ‘autonomous’, where the building’s design is governed by internal …
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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 …
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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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…
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Transformation as Movement
In 1888 the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin proposed the notion that the primary characteristic of baroque architecture is the illusion of movement. …
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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…
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Teaching Facades
As facades become more sophisticated and complex, more detail-intensive and performance-critical, it's vital that architecture students develop a dee…
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Structuring Skin
Curtain wall is the prevailing type of enclosure on modern buildings because of its economy, its independence from structure that allows flexibility …
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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…
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Patchwork
It may be difficult for modern man to believe that what is known as handicraft was once the advanced manufacturing of the day. These techniques were …
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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…
