Light: 75 kg/m2 < p ≤ 125 kg/m2

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.

Pich Aguilera studio is one of the non-conservative teams that always attract our attention, due to the overall formalization of their buildings and the technological strategies they adopt.

It is not possible to talk about facades without mentioning a very unique façade for the moment when it was built, and that even today continues being a reference.

The first point that draws our attention is the constructive system of own design, lightweight, based on a system of mullions (similar to a curtain wall). Despite the verticality imposed by the system, clearly visible from the outside elevation, the interior gives a fairly conventional image of blind parapet and horizontal windows. 

A double skin glass façade has indisputable formal possibilities, such as blurring the structural and/or functional order, providing uniformity and vanishing the volume limits so they merge with the sky. However, it contributes little to improving thermal aspects in our climate. 

This is an interesting resource to hide the blind area associated with the edge of the slab, the facilities’ cavity and the elevated floor without having to delimit this area with two transoms visible in the elevation. The only apparent cutting is that of the unitized panel, with greater or lesser density in the pattern of the serigraphy that opalizes or simply veils the transparency of the glass.

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.

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.

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.

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).

This hotel in Barcelona illustrates the typological confusion of contemporary façade systems and justifies the need for a taxonomic tool such as the one organised by this platform.