Engineering without the engine: An integrated panelized passive shading system for transparent façades

During the latter half of the last century, architects emphasized lightness and transparency in buildings, with trends towards fully glazed building envelopes, including glass façades, atriums and roof structures. However, these glass facades presented challenges such as, the structural design of the envelopes for safety, durability of joints, as well as daylight glare control, thermal insulation and solar heat gain. Today's changing paradigm for design, places an ever-greater emphasis on integrated solutions that are not only aesthetic and experiential, but embrace environmental influences. Environmental imperatives necessitate an agent for change that integrates environmental concerns with the human experience. Two contradictory factors influence the design of glass envelopes. On the one hand, stylist design overemphasizes the benefits of maximizing transparency (the desire to create ‘glass cathedrals'). This infatuation with transparency results in unintended consequences, namely, that glass facades are generally heavy and energy inefficient, resulting in solutions that are more expensive and wasteful of the planets resources. Therefore, there remain significant challenges for resolving the functional aspects in building facade designs. Whereas designs that are driven by pragmatic functional parameters are generally only concerned with the performance of a building, this in turn sacrifices the aesthetic form of a building in the interests of high performance.We address this conflicting issue by, considering both stylistic and pragmatic functionality, through an integrated passive solution. We address this by integrating "macro form” through function, related to occupancy and overall massing, with "micro configurations” through functional technology driven parameters. Thereby we adopt an integrative approach, which embraces multiple agents of interconnectivity that address aesthetics, energy, light, structure, materials, transparency, form and function. Our approach is to merge macro scale with microfunction thorough what we call a "functionally graded” façade system. The system passively integrates these multiple agents within a single customized solution that uniquely responds to the specifics of building program, site and geographical location. In this paper, we demonstrate how such a novel façade system may function at the intersections of architectural design - aesthetics - structural - energy performance and human comfort, as a an effective high performance solution for transparent façades, with an exciting range of expressive aesthetics