Contemporary

Interesting sub-frame solving the window opening in all the façade depth. It includes the banister and a gap specially designed to hide the sun protection ¡inside the cavity of the rain screen façade!

Unitized panels: moving from high-technological glass façade systems to a common façade solution with any distribution of openings, and the possibility of different finishing materials.

Here is a really interesting concrete solution.

As HEARING indicates on their own website "they used triangular fillets as profiled shuttering and were thus able to cause the grain to protrude evenly from the surface after surface treatment, washing in this case, thus providing the desired structure." 

Applying colour only to a superficial layer of concrete stone aggregate allows the opening to be highlighted with this separate, nearly white enclosing element.

Once again, this case study illustrates how difficult it is to name and classify the wide range of contemporary façade solutions.

Very narrow, large cladding pieces are attached longitudinally. The high number of horizontal profiles that are needed is increased by the fact that two adjacent plates do not always share fixing profiles, as in the lattice area. Therefore, the need for profiles is practically doubled in these parts of the façade.

A very suitable but expensive solution.
 

Wood has broken into the local construction sector to stay. Proof of this is that architects no longer boast of using it, to show that they undertake responsible, sustainable work. Instead, they use it because it is the most appropriate material to meet certain design requirements.

What an amazing solution! Covering the façade with an EPDM membrane like a padded jacket or a “boatiné coat”. It’s so obvious, but not common! I only remember one similar solution on the back façade of the Frei Photographic Studio in Weil am Rhein, by Herzog & de Meuron. They also used a waterproof membrane, on that occasion made of asphalt, for the cladding.

It is not easy to solve the façade construction of a building when this facade is supposed to be placed between the edges of the slabs, and yet the slabs all have different perimeters. The distance between a point on the edge of a slab and the equivalent point on the upper slab is therefore always different.

Here we refer to a solution of the kind in the study "Profiled metal sheets for the free design of continuous enclosures". These enclosures reach from the façade to the roof and resort to the same construction system, with on-site profiled metal sheets as the main ally.

It is always a pleasure, in a world that tends toward the hyper-technological, to get back to historical constructional solutions, that when carefully considered, coherently combine different local resources: both natural and processed.

This solution is a cavity wall. A double wall where the interior, made with concrete blocks, is part of the main structure of the building; while the exterior, built with Marés stone, needs only to be self-supporting and is stabilized against the inner wall.