Imprint

Foreword

30 years after the publication of our first construction handbook, this is the first in the series to deal with facades. Over the centuries, architects’ design services have often concentrated on developing impressive section drawings of buildings, which frequently became objects of heated controversy over questions of style chosen as well as a medium for conveying new artistic positions.

There is now an increasing focus once more on facades due to the growing importance taken on by exterior walls in the context of energy consumption issues and options for making use of environmental energy. In addition to this focus, and usually contrasting with it, are efforts at self-promotion and “identification with the address” for those clients for whom the “packaging” of their buildings, which often have quite banal interiors, has long since become a substitute for quality architecture. The booming Asian megacities show this quite clearly.

The sequence of this book’s chapters takes an expedient approach to designing and developing facade structures. Aspects that apply generally to the exterior walls of buildings, involving demands made on them, their principal functionality and structural design, have been separated from descriptions of the special features of individual cases. The book represents more than just a collection of different buildings in various locations and contexts, of different types and technologies. Rather, specific features have been classified and described based on the various materials used in their walls or cladding. The first part deals with demands made on facades from the inside, which derive from the building’s usage type. Buildings face very different local climatic conditions, depending on the region in which they are located. Out of this confrontation arise the functional demands on an exterior wall. These are formulated as a remit that is initially open to a range of possible solutions, so implementation details are not described in this section. The book’s most important statements are made in the form of images, diagrams and schematic illustrations showing the morphology of surfaces and openings. A building’s envelope interacts directly with its other subsystems: its support structure, the partitioning of rooms and technical building equipment. Various interdependencies exist or must be defined so that each structural system can be geometrically coordinated in the space. Dimensional and modular conditions and proportions must be defined for the building as a whole to be developed. Combining these aspects results in the parameters for material implementation based on the materials and construction methods to be chosen. If the materials and technologies used to manufacture them are important in defining further specific features, then certain physical, material, installation-related and aesthetic details must also be coordinated.

The second part of this book’s structure is based on this context. Here the chapters have been kept separate from examples and precede them. Each begins with a brief summary of the history of civilisation’s use of the material and its specific features. Here we do not limit the area of materials applications to building construction, simply because as civilisation has developed, technology has often emerged in different ways and interactions with materials and initial applications have often emerged from very different areas. Stone, ceramics and metal, for example, are so significant that whole cultural eras have been named after them. Today too, much technical innovation comes from the construction industry, especially in modern facade construction, through a transfer of technologies from different sectors, such as forming technologies, surface treatments and robotics. These chapters are followed by a section showing a selection of built ex amples focusing on materials, which provides insights into the range of possibilities available and is designed to inspire readers to further develop their own ideas. This is done by way of drawings of main facade details with explanations provided in keys because this is the medium usually used for conveying information to architects.