Contemporary

Composite façade panels are nothing new. They are there, waiting for the moment when the market will be ready to welcome them since the last decades of XX century.

The technology is already developed and essayed as those materials are perfectly used in many other applications. Maybe the cost, maybe the origin of the material (glass-fiber reinforced polyester), maybe we have not found yet its advantatges in building construction.

In the same way that we wonder whether the chicken or the egg came first, we could ask ourselves who takes the first steps in innovation: the architect proposing new solutions, or the industry developing them?. In most cases, developments in industry respond to new approaches suggested by architects. 

The building is very correct and discreet. The system was innovative at the time and in that place. Let us just mention something that, although obvious, always attracts our attention in this type of construction: the succession of technical fabrics that accompany an apparently simple construction. The issue is that building with brick has benefits that we are not aware of until we lose them: the material is inert, the mechanism of union between pieces guarantees the sealing of joints. Losing performance in the main façade layer means entrusting it to added elements.

This residential building in Barcelona is highlighted on account of the overall strategy that has been used to solve this particular structural system. It is one of the first examples of the work of this team of architects that shows a design approach based on the optimisation of prefabricated elements according to a well organised arrangement of the floor plan.

There is little to say about such a glass façade. A steel-profiles mesh covers everyday life like a blanket.

Load bearing facades are nowadays a common solution due to the permeability they permit in the inner space. Some of those structures are let to be seen from the outside, some of them are not. 

The Hotel Constanza is part of the Illa Diagonal complex. Like the main building, the facade is covered with a travertine rain screen. The narrowness of the drainage cavity is striking, but is interrupted by the lack of cleanliness of the insulation surrounding the fixings.

An exciting challenge by Mecanotubo.

Building construction in the second half of the twentieth century, up to the start of the twenty-first century in Spain due to restrictions on inventiveness imposed by regulations, is characterized by a proliferation of systems for the blind area of façade. All of them are supported as systems by the industry and tend to be prefabricated, dry assembled and fixed.

There are lots of things to say of each of the buildings we publish in this website. However, from the beginning we decided to focus just in one aspect or curiosity for each of them. 

ETICS solutions, which are now so common due to the thermal insulation continuity they allow, were already used twenty-five years ago in designs such as the MACBA building. At that time, achieving continuous rendering without joints was not that simple, as the rendering materials were not as good as the ones we use today.

Lightweight solutions for the rainscreen outer layer were barely known. Probably because the architects did not trust this solution, the inner wall was completely covered with a watertight membrane.