Contemporary

The façade of San Telmo museum manages to extract all possible design potential from the succession of layers. The surprising thing in this case is that the architects are not limited to the façade layers. In their proposal, they consider as layers the planes that follow one another when a transversal cut is made into the building. So the built volume and its limits, the façade and the mountain all merge.

It is not easy to solve the entire envelope of a building, both façade and roof, with a continuous mantle of slopes varying from 0% to 100%. Tightness in the façade plane, where gravity acts in our favour, has been entrusted to geometry and drainage. However, this solution is not possible on the roof. The changes of slope in a topography of rounded ridges generates practically zero slope planes, which can only be resolved with absolutely waterproof materials.

In this building by Stump & Schibli Architekten we want to highlight the wisdom of solving the blind area with continuous horizontal stripes along the façades, while the treatment of the openings is adapted to varying conditions in the courtyard façades and the more urban ones. 

Amazing!!! Apparently formal, exaggerated, gratuitous… nothing could be further from the truth!!!

This façade is covered by an extraordinary sun and rain screen. Try to drive the rain water to the inside… impossible!! Only a horrible wind could achieve that by moving water against gravity. 

About the filtering function: filt3rs.net

The façade solution for the Institut de Recerca of the Hospital de Sant Pau illustrates the collaboration of Pich-Aguilera Arquitectes with formalization very similar to that of the Leitat building. If we look at the naked image of the thermal and watertight envelope, the two buildings can hardly be distinguished. In addition, both are covered with a ceramic lattice that partially hides the inner closure from the sun.

Here we see a very interesting process of replacing a stick curtain wall with another, whilst keeping the building in use and without a provisional enclosure a few metres from the façade.

In filt3rs we talk about “A unique wrapping”; P. Garrido and J. Prous in “Deep Skin” refer to “Burqas and veilings”. This project by IDOM also adopts the tendency to cover the building with a continuous skin that is more or less abstract and placed over a more functional enclosure.

On this occasion, the interior is glass and the outer skin a perforated metal sheet that reproduces the image of a green landscape.

The MACBA, the Film Library and now the new Massana school building: all of these are large public buildings inserted into a dense, small-grain urban structure. In the case of the Massana school, the strategy was to break down the volume into two bodies that do not even seem to be part of the same building, justifying the great hall.

This façade is not watertight and it is not airtight. Depending on the density and size of the stones, it protects against direct sun radiation but without managing the visual relationship with the outside. It considerably blocks the entry of light, gives privacy and protects from intrusion. If it is true that, together with a drained cavity, it would constitute a watertight envelope, but it seems that this is not the case here.

This is a very interesting façade concept.

The façade brings together all the adjectives that architects use to describe enclosures that are “trending”: integrated, active, flexible and perfectible.

It is a rainscreen façade in which the cladding plates, together with the substructure, can incorporate a range of functions including active energy production. The cladding plates, which are all the same size, are interchangeable, making the enclosure flexible. The support and anchoring system allow new cladding plates to be added with improved functions.