Vertical Facades: Design and Construction

About this course.

A building facade is the external vertical envelope of the building, and its fundamental job is to separate and mediate between the outside environment and the controlled conditions inside — but it does this across many performance areas at once, which is what makes facade design so demanding. The short answer is that a facade must simultaneously keep out weather, resist and carry loads, control the flow of heat and moisture, contribute to fire safety, reduce noise, admit daylight and views, and present the building's appearance, all while moving with the building and remaining durable and maintainable. No single one of these functions can be optimised in isolation, because improving one often affects another, and the art of facade design is balancing them.

The most obvious function is weather protection. The facade is the barrier against rain, wind, sun and the outside air, and keeping water out of the building is one of its most important and most frequently failed tasks. Closely tied to this is the facade's role as an air barrier, controlling uncontrolled air leakage into and out of the building, which affects both comfort and energy use. Water and air management are so central that a later module is devoted to them.