Simple profiles

This case would be quite an ordinary rain screen façade with a lightweight steel frame main wall and a cladding, if it were not for the reflective membrane. This layer achieves air-tightness all around the building and moisture protection of the main wall, allowing the exterior board not to be a cement board, as is the standardised Knauf system.

Elegant and well-resolved contemporary conventional façade solution where the main sheet, the exposed brick masonry wall, passes in front of the slab fronts.

Very astutely, the architects decide to support this wall over the window openings, thus avoiding having parts of the wall supported on two different levels, the slab and the lintel.

The solution is simple, clean and coherent.

Related cases:

An unusual solution in Mediterranean latitudes, to be considered at a time of a wood boom.

Like cross laminated timber panels, this system enables the construction of wooden wall structures. Some of these walls constitute the main facade layer.

An important difference between CLT panels and this system is in the format of the assembled elements. Cross laminated timber beams are smaller than panels and therefore lighter; they can easily be moved and hoisted without a crane.

The proliferation of prefabricated systems, including those used in façades, is causing an extent use of terms such as “modularity”, which we could say is “trending topic”. What a pity not to use it according to its most specific meaning, the one that refers us to the module as understood by Le Corbusier among others.

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.

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. 

This is a very interesting façade concept.

The façade brings together all the adjectives that architects use to describe enclosures that are “trending”: integrated, active, flexible and perfectible.

It is a rainscreen façade in which the cladding plates, together with the substructure, can incorporate a range of functions including active energy production. The cladding plates, which are all the same size, are interchangeable, making the enclosure flexible. The support and anchoring system allow new cladding plates to be added with improved functions.

It is not possible to talk about facades without mentioning a very unique façade for the moment when it was built, and that even today continues being a reference.

The first point that draws our attention is the constructive system of own design, lightweight, based on a system of mullions (similar to a curtain wall). Despite the verticality imposed by the system, clearly visible from the outside elevation, the interior gives a fairly conventional image of blind parapet and horizontal windows.