Heavy: > 125 kg/m2

Sauerbruch Hutton, as always, please us with their magnificent architecture, accurate construction, and a sensitive and warm colour palette that fits the surroundings perfectly. 

Look at the interesting brickwork they have developed in this project. Its geometry, enhanced by the different colours, decomposes the brickwork wall into a pixelated surface, an abstract texture where each pixel projects shadow over the wall itself.
 

Resorting to precast concrete panels for the façade enclosure is nothing new. In fact, the use of said material in large-format boards of minimum-thickness is not new either, the ΩZ pre-stressed board system has been allowing it for some time. 

The thinness of the plate makes it difficult to perform an adequate sealing of the joint and therefore the tendency is to leave them open, and define a drained cavity on the back to grant water tightness. A rain screen.

Seeking for the new massivity we were talking about in the study "Closed joints claddings"

For more information about the case take a look to that video

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.

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!

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.

Most of the façade solutions on this website are non-loadbearing. As they are independent systems, how to fix or support them on the main structure of the building must be defined.

However, the need to fix the façades is not a result of the emergence of these non-loadbearing enclosures. Whenever a façade has been identified as something singular, and so distinguished from the rest of the building, we can find attachment mechanisms.

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.
 

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.

This residential building is an example of our nowadays most common way of building, not only in terms of the materials and systems being used, which we consider appropriate, but also in terms of the lack of precision in the execution. 
We want to draw particular attention to the indefiniteness of the drainage space behind the ceramic outer layer. How different from the drawings is the execution!! Fortunately, the horizontal joints are overlapped.