Contemporary

Batlle and Roig designed a double skin façade for this office building in 22@. The inner layer meets the thermal requirements and those of air and water tightness, while the outer layer delimits the building volumetrically and seeks to improve its thermal behaviour.

This is an excellent proposal for solving façade composition with a rectangular format checkerboard pattern (the blind and hollowed areas only touch at the apex), avoiding the presence of the slab.

Those who have faced this situation will know how difficult it is to unite at a vertex two openings on different floors, separated by a slab, without showing the thickness of this structural element.

The facade of GAES headquarters in Barcelona is a risky proposal. In filt3rs.net we addressed the behavior of the green filtering elements; here is the time to comment the facade solution as a whole.

Plaza de la Garduña, in the Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona, is characterized by the uniqueness of the buildings that surround it and give it life: the new Massana School, the Boquería market and the old hospital. Among them, the residential building on the north side of the square responds to this uniqueness with sober neutrality. The building occupies the corner that connects the square with Dr. Fleming’s gardens.

Glass façades have always been supported by an industry that can ensure their continuous development and evolution to adapt to new functional and formal requirements. This is unquestionably positive, but also means that the relatively fast obsolescence of façades results in the need to replace them quite frequently.

Some cladding panels offer many possibilities. In these single-family houses in Palma, the panels used for the outer layer of a rainscreen façade are perforated in the terrace space to define an umbraculum. There is no change of material and the composition of prisms remains nearly unaltered; it is simply a matter of lattices.

There is no easy project, but it is particularly challenging to refurbish a residential building of this size in which, over the years, each occupant has modified their terrace individually. Here the architects solved the challenge with a few well-placed interventions.

In the Beethoven Building in Barcelona, the replacement of the façade clearly renews the image of the building while maintaining the idea of a continuous glass enclosure and the original cutting. The renewed image is created by the materials, the characteristics of both glass and profiles and, above all, the strong rhythm conferred by the mullion covers and the couples of exempt profiles projecting outwards.

We are pleased to have the opportunity to write about a façade capable of expressing so much sensitivity regarding the context and its functionality, while manifesting itself as an impeccable jewel in the chromatic composition at short and medium distances.

Again, this Catalan studio proposes a clear and simple façade. The dry constructed façade is based on three layers: the main one resolving air and water tightness, an inner cladding and an outer one. It might be thought that the façade works properly just with the main sandwich layer (like the Courts extension in Zaragoza).