Poetic intent, physical reality: a life in structural glass
Hugh Dutton traced a career in structural glass from its origins with Peter Rice at La Villette to three recent projects of his own, a hurricane-proof...
Buildings for people: rethinking the office tower at 70 Hudson Yards
Hagen Scutt and his project team charted 70 Hudson Yards from a conventional 2019 office tower through the COVID pivot to an 'office 2.0', an all-elec...
From concept to operation: AI's place in the built environment
Alfonso Oliva convened a panel of designers, engineers and sustainability consultants to map where AI actually sits in the built environment, as a co-...
From wind tunnel to window: automotive parallels in a façade
Jamison Guest and Nathan McRae drew a parallel between automotive and façade design through a vast Michigan campus for an automotive company, where a...
Skin-deep efficiency: rationalising three façades for the fabricator
Manan Raval and Jun Schick Lee walked through three New York façades where careful engineering of joint layout, panel modules and fin details turned c...
Slowing the heat: how a window's thermal performance is measured and won
Gary Tongco worked through the fundamentals of window thermal performance, the difference between U-value, U-factor and R-value, and the three paths h...
Timber, weathering steel and a spirit of place: the Springsteen archive
Zach Craun walked through the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music, a mass-timber cultural building rising from a coastal meadow a...
Beyond the envelope: façades that generate power, and policy
Luis Palacio traced one façade idea across three towers and nineteen years, a Seoul headquarters whose photovoltaic skin was driven by energy policy,...
A century, matched: restoring the Waldorf Astoria's envelope
Frank Mahan and his project team traced a decade of work on the Waldorf Astoria, an art deco landmark inside and out, where the envelope had to be bro...
A ceramic look in cast concrete: the GFRC façade at 600 West 125th
Joseph Madaghiele and Melissa Wong traced the glass-fibre-reinforced concrete cladding of Columbia's 600 West 125th Street from a brief that wanted th...
Pressed and fired: the case for ultracompact stone on the façade
Dean White set out the case for ultracompact stone as a façade material, a slab pressed under tens of thousands of tonnes and fired to a near-liquid s...
Less is more insulating: the case for vacuum insulated glass
Justin D'Alessandro made the case for vacuum insulated glass as a way out of the widening tension between energy codes and design ambition, an 8.3-mil...
A $219 billion cycle: where New York’s façade work comes from
Carlo Scissura set out New York's construction outlook for the year ahead, a record three-year cycle of roughly $219 billion spread across offices, ho...
89 Avenue Yorkville: deciding the façade before it is built
Tobiasz Staszak used a New York-inspired Toronto apartment tower to show how a shared virtual-reality environment, a projector-driven cave rather than...
Made to look load-bearing: the Frick's limestone expansion
Paul Granger and Tali Mejicovsky traced the Frick Collection's expansion, a restrained continuation of Carrère & Hastings' 1914 mansion that keeps its...
From renderings to real time: running façade decisions through a game engine
John Ivanoff argued that the spreadsheets and one-off slide decks engineering teams hand to clients are the wrong medium for façade decisions, and sho...
Making the curtain wall breathe: hiding, and showing, the window
Hugh Trumbull framed a career-long problem, how to break a sealed curtain wall so it can ventilate, as an architectural opportunity, tracing a run of...
Steel over aluminium: the case for a hybrid curtain wall
Eric Claeys made a combative case for a patented hybrid steel curtain wall, combining the strengths of stick and unitised systems without silicone, an...
Load-bearing again: reinventing terra cotta for the low-carbon façade
Andrew Pries argued that terra cotta, one of the lowest-embodied-carbon materials available, can do far more than clad a building, showing a new load-...
Holding up the brick: a stainless approach to masonry support
Sean Og Coyle argued that New York's overwhelmingly brick skyline deserves better support than the rusting steel angle, making the case for a fully st...
Lace and turrets: two contemporary façades in historic New York
David Kubik and Todd Poisson showed two Manhattan projects that build new façades in dialogue with history, a hanging concrete 'lace' screen that fina...
Holding back the water, transparently: laminated glass for flood control
Alberto Alarcón made the case for laminated glass as a transparent answer to a fast-growing problem, flooding, explaining why a stiff ionoplast interl...
Layers of light: how façades shape daylight for people
Good daylight, like good electric light, is layered, a pleated courthouse façade, inboard louvers, diffusing inner glass layers and storytelling frit...
From flat to fantastic: free-form tempered glass without a mould
Derek Losi traced the evolution of curved architectural glass from slow gravity-bent moulds through machine bending, and set out a mould-free furnace...
Rated, but you'd never know: steel fire and security systems evolved
Ben Haigh traced how fire-, ballistic- and security-rated steel systems have shed their institutional look, narrow thermally broken profiles cutting s...
262 Fifth Avenue: wrapping a tower core in photovoltaic glass
Diego Cuevas and his project team made the case for photovoltaic glass as a designed building envelope rather than a bolt-on solar array, one judged o...