Abbas started from an uncomfortable observation. The industry spends enormous effort discussing design, materials, procurement, testing and construction, and yet, he argued, the quality of a façade is determined long before any of those, by the way decisions get made. His session was a case for looking at façades through the lens of systematic thinking, and at the forces that shape how a building envelope behaves over decades.

The problem, he was careful to say, is not a shortage of expertise. Ask any façade specialist for the criteria by which a façade’s technical performance should be judged and they will answer correctly, structural and acoustic performance, U-value and thermal behaviour, cleaning and access. Everyone can define success. The hard part is arriving there.

Where it goes wrong, he suggested, is in the stakeholders and how their decisions align. The developer seeks value, the contractor seeks buildability, the architect seeks vision, the consultant seeks performance, each entirely reasonable on its own terms, and each pulling in a slightly different direction. A façade is the accumulation of those decisions.

Hence the mindset he was arguing for: one façade, many decisions. Treat the decision-making process itself, who decides what, in what order, against which criteria, as the thing that actually determines whether the envelope succeeds, and the rest of the effort has something solid to stand on.