A rain screen made of glass (139)

Have a look to this façade solution, to the characteristics of the different layers overlapped, and then have a look to the Torre Agbar façade solution.

They look quite similar: a wall, in one case made of small elements while in the other made of concrete poured on site, a ribbed metal sheet, glass slats. In both cases the thermal insulation is in the inside.

In this website we classified the Torre Agbar’s façade as cladded while we are considering Pompeu Fabra’s one as a rain screen. Even though they use nearly the same elements and in the same order the clue is in the detail and in the relation between them. The distance among layers, the joints solution and the obvious fact that in the Torre Agbar the glass slats are orientable while in Pompeu Fabra they compose the outer layer of the rain screen façade so they need to be fix and preserve the appropriate distance among them.

As we are saying, in Pompeu Fabra the outer layer of the rain screen is the glass and so the inner one is the brick wall cladded with the ribbed metal sheet. Observe how this sheet is fixed over the wall, just with a small profile without any mechanism that may permit correcting verticality.