Textile Membrane for Façade Retrofitting: Exploring Fabric Potentialities for the Development of Innovative Strategies

The European building stock demands urgent renovation due to the age of the buildings, their expected lifetime, and their excessive energy consumption, which accounts for more than a third of the EU’s total emissions. However, the complexities involved, such as time, costs, and structural modifications, often discourage clients, tenants, and occupants from undergoing a building renovation process. Textile membranes, despite their long history in various architectural applica- tions, have only been employed in façades in the last decades. Their intrinsic properties, such as lightness and flexibility, together with rapid assembly and low maintenance make these materials particularly suitable for façade retrofitting. Therefore, they are worth exploring as a way to promote the development of lightweight and easy-to-assemble façade products that could help overcome the current limitations of building retrofitting efforts. This paper aims to establish relationships between textile membranes and potential building retrofit applications. To this end, this study builds on the categorization of traditional façade retrofit strategies and proposes a new classification for textile façade retrofit products. The methodology includes a comprehensive literature review of textile properties and characteristics, along with a thorough assessment through case studies, of membrane use in façade applications. A sequential investigation leads to the main outcome of identifying three clear pathways for the development of new textile-based façade products for building retrofit

Proceedings of the COST Action TU1403 : Adaptive Facades Network Final Conference

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

State of the Art in Building Façades

This chapter presents a portfolio of building materials suitable for facades. It describes the relationship between material type, building element, facade, and the entire building structure. Traditional facades based on static components, as well as adaptive concepts able to interact with changing environmental conditions, are briefly described and illustrated with pictures. Climatic design principles, biomimicry, and bioinspiration in architecture are introduced with the purpose of inspiring future developments

Designing Building Skins with Biomaterials

This chapter presents several successful examples of biomaterial facade design. It discusses facade function from aesthetical, functional, and safety perspectives. Special focus is directed on novel concepts for adaptation and special functionalities of facades. Analysis of the structure morphologies and aesthetic impressions related to the bio-based building facades is supported with photographs collected by authors in various locations. Finally, particular adaptations and special functionalities of bio-based facades going beyond traditional building envelope concept are supported by selected case studies

Design of construction - Imagine!

Intreerede Delft University of Technology, 23 Juli 2006IntreeredeDesign of Construtio

Design for deconstruction: Or why aluminium and glass is better than wood?

The first law of thermodynamics defines: Energy can neither be produced nor destroyed, but only converted into other types of energy [1]. From this it follows for us and our topic of circularity in the building industry that we must deal with the energy that the earth receives or has received, the solar radiation, and can feed our requirements from these. For Central Europe we can assume a solar radiation of 100 kWh/m²a [2] – however, when using energy we do not limit ourselves to the current solar radiation but also use stored solar radiation in the form of coal, oil, gas, biomass / wood and geothermal energy. Here it is only a question of how fast the energy flow is – several million years as with coal, oil and gas or only years or decades as with biomass / wood

Special Issue: European Perspectives

This special issue features a wide range of topics, stemming from research activities of members from the European Façade Network (EFN). The EFN seeks to advance and promote façade design and engineering at a European level and beyond, through inclusive collaboration between European Research centres, Universities, and alumni, resulting in skills and knowledge transfer in education, research, and development. Consequently, this special issue showcases a selection of research experiences presented at two scientific events sponsored by the EFN