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The modern curtain wall has
evolved from static wrapper to active building system.
By Sara Hart
Process is innovation
The era of facade as passive envelope is over. Its demise
is long overdue, according to the late Reyner Banham, who
in 1969 wrote in The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment
that the intellectual division between structure and building
systems is patently false. He lamented that discussion of
what makes a building habitable rarely goes beyond space-making
and form-giving. As sustainability becomes an assumed goal,
such thinking seems counterintuitive. If he were here today,
Banham would be glad to see the recent trend away from this
segregation of building functions to what is often called
“the whole-building concept,” in which all the systems—HVAC,
plumbing, electricity, structure, and the building skin—are
designed to be interdependent. To some engineering minds,
it is in the process that realizes the whole-building concept
that real innovation is to be found.
A successful example of this can be seen in the Sobanski
Palace in central Warsaw, Poland, designed by Dublin-based
A&D Wejchert Architects and engineered by Buro Happold’s
Bath, England, office. Stephen Tanno, group director at Buro
Happold Facade Engineering, applied the firm’s process
theory to an office-building addition to the palace.
A high-quality facade must be engineered in the earliest
stages of design development. Tanno believes that the traditional
approach to facade design, which has a specialist contractor
arriving on the scene only after the construction documents
have been bid, does not work well for complex projects. First
of all, the facade contractor comes in too late after the
design has been fully developed and tendered. At this stage,
it is economically impossible to change the fundamentals of
the documents. But more important, in a situation where the
building envelope is integral to environmental performance,
contractors too often don’t understand the interdependence
of all the systems, even though they are experts in cladding
and know their own facade systems extremely well. If the contractor—or
the engineer, for that matter—comes in too late, too
much time is spent revising details in the shop drawings.
Tanno relies on a rule of thumb to tell him if his process-
oriented approach is working. “When the facade package
is tendered, if the bids come in within 10 percent of each
other, then the documents were clear and complete,” he
says. “By going the traditional route, I’ve seen
bids can come in as much as 100 percent apart.”
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