19 results

  • Historical Evolution of Responsive Facades featured image

    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…
  • 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

  • Preserving a Historic Facade

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

  • 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

  • Nested Density

    Projecting imagery onto building facades is not only becoming a marketing necessity for successful urban spectacles but is also altering social urban

  • Autonomous or Appropriate featured image

    Autonomous or Appropriate

    This paper examines two profoundly different design approaches: one, herein called ‘autonomous’, where the building’s design is governed by internal…
  • 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…
  • Facade Games featured image

    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…
  • 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

  • The Tectonics of Flimsiness

    Architecture has traditionally celebrated the joining of two building components or materials. Joinery serves as a key site for architectural

  • Doubling Mies

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

  • 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

  • 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.

  • Thinking About Facades featured image

    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…
  • Teaching Facades

    As facades become more sophisticated and complex, more detail-intensive and performance-critical, it's vital that architecture students develop a

  • 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…
  • 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

  • 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

  • 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