Jincy Mariam Rinu and Elia Galatolo made the case that a façade is a web of design variables that all pull on each other, g-value, glazing ratio, solar gains, weight, embodied carbon, and that parametric modelling is the only sane way to balance them.
Arup, they noted, is a global built-environment consultancy shaped by Sir Ove Arup’s belief that design should be purposeful, useful and excellent, work grounded in a contribution to clients, communities and society.
Their starting point was that the façade never sits in isolation. It works with lighting, MEP, architecture and sustainability, and those disciplines have to sit together at the very start of a project to define the basis of design. The hard part, as everyone knows, is that the coordination has to happen simultaneously, not in a tidy sequence.
Narrow the focus to the façade and the difficulty becomes concrete. A few of the most relevant design variables it drives, g-value, window-to-wall ratio, solar gains, weight, embodied carbon, are only a start, and each one changes the others. That coupling is what makes the design process complicate exponentially rather than add up neatly.
Their answer is parametric modelling: moving, as the talk’s subtitle put it, from geometry to energy, sustainability and cost, rapidly testing large sets of façade options and linking key drivers directly to daylight, comfort and carbon outcomes, so the design is found through the numbers rather than guessed and then justified.