![]() For the large number of professionals whose clients continue to demand architectural envelopes constructed and operated to meet net zero goals, avoiding the use of data is not an option.Īnd yet, in and of itself, data is grossly insufficient for understanding the role skins play in the wider cultural context of buildings. A plethora of numbers and figures is now available to designers and engineers. What is clear, however, is that the vast quantity of information and data generated, simulated, collected, analyzed and associated with the energy loses and gains of building skins increases exponentially every year. For others, it only privileges the technological determinism of building physics at the exclusion of all other design considerations. For many, refocusing the functionality of building envelopes on environmental metrics offers precisely the needed, vastly more objective terrain within which to evaluate their role as facades. Increasingly, they are responsible for the conservation of energy, the maintenance of thermal comfort, and the optimization of daylight and fresh air distribution, and as such designed, constructed and operated to meet ever more prescriptive goals. As highly technological devices, these works of architectural engineering are predicated on data based performance benchmarks, virtual simulations, and the laws of computational fluid dynamics. ![]() Much of the current discourse on energy efficiency and architectural design has coalesced around the subject of building skins. Hence, this paper develops a theoretical structure within which to describe, analyze and interpret the values made possible by this new and expanding field of performance based envelopes. Definition building envelope professional#Lastly, the paper examines the rise of the new integrated design building envelope professional called upon to deliver ever-better performing skins, whether in the guise of energy modeler, climate engineer or façade construction specialist. Definition building envelope skin#Cantilevered Louvers, Double Skin Facades and Hybrid Conditioned Atria are representative of this new paradigm as is the use of Responsive Technologies to optimize their behaviors. To begin with, the way in which building envelopes are no longer separators, dividers and barriers between a building’s interior and exterior conditions, but rather, “spatially” defined environments that fully engage the totality of a building’s engineering systems, is discussed. Of particular interest to this paper is a discussion of new theoretical paradigms associated with the design and operation of high performance envelopes of which four characteristics of this emergent sub-discipline are herein examined. For many of its most advanced practitioners, the contemporary design of facades engages the true potential of “performance” when it deepens, broadens and complicates the theoretical dimension of this most liminal of surfaces. ![]() ![]() Realigning the design of building envelopes within the measures of air, light and heat has rendered possible an inventive form of practice whose benefits are far in excess of the metrics of data and analysis. ![]()
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