Glass

This use of the double skin facade where the outer glass is patterned with a white serigraphy that gradually dilutes as one gets closer to the areas of vision may disappear as rapidly as it has spread. It is an easy way to blur the openings limits. In the case of this hotel in London, the opening is perfectly well defined on the wall in the interior skin. This technique harks back to the effect of traditional interior thin white curtains, except for the important difference that the curtain can be used to cover the openings with a very efficient light diffuser.

The extension of the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Law was a risky intervention: the erection of 16,000 m2 next to a jewel of rationalist architecture of a smaller size, at about 12,000 m2, being the plot of the new construction considerably smaller than that of the historic building. 

We do not want to evaluate the architectural intervention, but simply mention that resorting to neutrality is perfectly understandable. 

The Inbisa Tower case study enables us to highlight the subtle design strategies that make a building with four apparently identical façades so suggestive.

The façade is organized from several overlapping grids. Pillars and slabs cladded in aluminium create the main order: a grid on the scale of the structural system. Over this grid, some mullions define a second order on the scale of the windows. This second order runs literally over the first grid, regardless of whether what is behind is blind or transparent, breaking the rigidity and scale of the main order.

The unfinished Plaça d’Europa project arises from a contradiction. The objective was to provide the city of Barcelona with a more representative entrance from the airport, with towers that appear to be of tertiary use. And we say “appear to be” because many of these towers were in fact designed for residential use. This contradiction justifies the façade solution adopted in the towers.

The façade of the Renaissance hotel in L’Hospitalet has a peculiar thermal behaviour. It is based on retarding thermal loss with the concrete wall (thermal inertia), while minimizing the thermal difference between the two sides of this wall with a closed air cavity on its outer side. This closed air cavity has its thermal insulation improved by a reflective membrane coating one of its sides.

Glass, lightness and transparency is the message the façade of this police headquarters was designed to give. It achieves this even though the façade is neither light nor transparent. The horizontal serigraphy combined with the thin eaves projecting shadow over the façade give an image of dynamism. Those eaves are randomly distributed even in the opaque area of the façade.

In IEP, the courtyard and the interior office space are perceived as a continuum. This close relationship between inner and outer spaces is one of the most interesting aspects of the building. The façade solution is the resource needed to achieve this. The glass enclosure is freed from any structure just by making the glass work like plates resting on two supports instead of four.

The façade that closes the south face of the tower seems from the outside to be a simple stick curtain wall that would be of little interest if it were not for the fact that it is photovoltaic. We have dedicated a section to it because of the uniqueness of the space it contains, and the abstraction in the design that this allows. This curtain wall is the enclosure of the elevator core and therefore is devoid of many of the requirements of a façade.

This emblematic building in the London financial district maintains its formal unity beyond the differences in the design of the façades depending on their orientation. The case "Devoid of the human scale (034)" describes the southwest façade of the same building. The southeast and northwest façades attract our attention due to the sobriety conferred by the enormous glazed surface, which is only interrupted every three floors by horizontal bands of stainless steel.

On this occasion, Batlle and Roig resort to a curtain wall in which partial structures are assembled at each slab front without physical continuity between them. Glass panes are then supported over the partial structures to close the façade (have a look at the "Cadireta" curtain wall structure). Each two glass panes are framed with an aluminium frame made of unitized panels profiles. So, is this a unitized façade or a curtain wall one? Maybe it is a mixture of the two?