Façade

Summary

A façade (fəˈsɑːd; ) is generally the front part or exterior of a building. It is a loan word from the French façade (fasad), which means 'frontage' or 'face'. In architecture, the façade of a building is often the most important aspect from a design standpoint, as it sets the tone for the rest of the building. From the engineering perspective, the façade is also of great importance due to its impact on energy efficiency. For historical façades, many local zoning regulations or other laws greatly restrict or even forbid their alteration. Etymology The word is a loanword from the French façade, which in turn comes from the Italian facciata, from faccia meaning 'face', ultimately from post-classical Latin facia. The earliest usage recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is 1656. Façades added to earlier buildings It was quite common in the Georgian period for existing houses in English towns to be given a fashionable new façade. For example, in the city of Bath,

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%C3%A7ade

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The challenge is to provide information about visual comfort and energy savings potential on an annual basis while daylight is dynamic, and the interaction between daylight, the façade and the indoor material is complex. A new approach has been build to assess the performance of light-interacting façades and indoor coating. This approach led to an annual climate-based simulation which allows to assess the performance of systems for the whole year. Furthermore, the approach makes it possible to deal with complex façade systems because it integrates the Dynamic Radiance method and its BTDF matrix. The complexity of such a matrix has been tackled by a stereographic representation which give an comprehensive overview of the façade behavior. Thank to this, results are easier to understand and visualize. This work shows why the design of a façade and of its associated indoor coating are strongly coupled. A coating optimized for on system will not fit with other systems, and vice versa. A balance between light diffusion and light conduction must be found for every new façade. To move further, new metric evaluating the coupling and the performance of a façade system can be imagined. It would be based on the sensibility of the system to the properties changes of its associated indoor coating. L’enjeux est de fournir des informations sur le confort visuel et le potentiel en économie d’énergie à l’échelle annuelle car la lumière naturelle est dynamique, et les interactions entre la façade est le revêtement intérieur sont complexes. Une nouvelle approche intégrative a été mise au point pour évaluer la performance des façades complexes et des matériaux intérieurs. Cette approche permet de réaliser des simulations annuelles basées sur le climat. De plus, cette approche permet de traiter les façades complexes par le biais de leur BTDF, ce qui est rendu possible par la méthode Dynamic Radiance, qui a été intégrée dans l’approche in- tégrative développée ici. La matrice des BTDF utilisée dans cette méthode a été rendu plus claire grâce à une nouvelle représentation stéréographique qui permet d’avoir un aperçu complet du comportement d’une façade. Ce travail montre combien la conception d’une façade est intimement liée à celle du revêtement intérieur qui lui est associé. Un revêtement bon pour un système de façade ne le sera pas forcément pour un autre système, et inversement. Pour aller plus loin, on peut envisager de mettre sur pied une nouvelle métrique qui viendrait évaluer le couplage d’une façade avec son revêtement intérieur et par là-même sa performance. Cela reposerait sur la sensibilité du système de façade aux changements de propriétés du revêtement intérieur qui lui est associé.

2012

Buildings account for over 40% of the energy consumption in the United States, nearly 40% of which is attributed to lighting. The selection of a fenestration system for a building is a critical decision as it offsets electric lighting use as well as impacts energy performance through heating and cooling systems. Further, the fenestration system contributes to both occupant comfort and ambiance of the space. Complex Fenestration Systems (CFS) address these factors with a variety of innovative technologies but the language to describe, discuss, and compare them does not exist. Existing traditional metrics for fenestration systems are unable to reveal the benefits that characterize complex fenestration systems because they are rigid, do not reflect annual performance, and were developed for a different purpose. The framework presented in this research offers a solution to this problem by using an annual climate-based methodology to provide a comprehensive evaluation of a system by incorporating three of the most relevant performance aspects: energy efficiency, occupant visual comfort, and ability to view through. Three metrics, the Relative Energy Impact (REI), the Extent of Comfortable Daylight (ECD), and the View Through Potential (VTP), were derived from these three criteria to express, in relative terms, a façade’s contribution to building energy use, comfortable daylight conditions, and the degree of transparency, respectively. Several practical matters were considered when developing a policy-relevant set of metrics, including both ease of calculation for manufacturers and usability for consumers. As such, the calculation methodology evolved from its initial proposal into a simplified approach, analytical where possible, and into a label-like concept for visual representation. These metrics are intended to exist as a mechanism by which manufacturers can evaluate and compare façade systems, provide high-level intuition of relative performance for designers and contractors, and enable the balance of performance objectives based on user preference. Ultimately, the creation of this comprehensive language is intended to stimulate innovation in fenestration systems and encourage their use in both new and retrofit building applications.

2012

Impact of facade details on the reliability of performance-based decisions for early-stage neighborhood designs

Minu Agarwal

Neighborhood-scale projects often commence with the conceptualization of several massing-schemes as potential design solutions. There is growing interest in using building performance simulation (BPS) to evaluate and rank such conceptual stage schemes in order to choose ones that best support performance goals related to energy and indoor comfort. However, such evaluations are typically made at a time of deficiency in information on building level attributes that influence performance, raising questions regarding their usefulness for reliable decision-making. In this thesis, a new method, that builds upon existing risk assessment methods, is introduced to calculate the risk of performance loss faced by a conceptual stage BPS user/decision maker (DM). The proposed method considers three sources of risk of performance loss (1) reversal in ranks of design proposals (2) latency effect or a delayed discovery of performance gain (3) insufficient performance gain or loss of expected performance gain. These losses result from a design choice made between competing design proposals based on conceptual design stage BPS results that would be rendered invalid under future design development possibilities. To observe these losses and estimate the risk, a virtual progression of the design process is done through incremental facade levels of detail (fLOD) resulting in several future design scenarios. The resulting risk value combines the overall chance and magnitude of loss in the future design scenarios. It is further categorized as high' or 'low' risk based on the number of design paths that lead to future design scenarios with unacceptable loss. This risk assessment method was tested by running a number of relative performance comparisons between pairs of competing neighborhood design proposals (N=780), based on three commonly used indoor environment related performance metrics: spatial daylight autonomy (sDA), annual heating and annual cooling demand. The results led to several important findings. First, while many performance evaluations lead to risk-free decisions, the number of high-risk cases was large enough (e.g. 1 in 5 comparisons on sDA ) to suggest reconsideration of conceptual stage decision-making practices for projects where several design alternatives need to be ranked. Second, the likelihood of high-risk cases regarding performance loss depends on the metric, and becomes irrelevant only when design alternatives differ significantly in their evaluation outcome already at a low level of detail (LOD). Third, rank assignments based on either daylight (sDA) or annual cooling demand were found to be afflicted by all three sources of risk - rank reversal, latency effect, and insufficient performance gain, in annual heating demand evaluations, almost all cases of high-risk were due to latency effect. The aim of this risk assessment method is to link the reliability in decision making to fLOD present in the BPS models used for the performance evaluation. An original visualization aid is proposed to facilitate the DMâs understanding of risk, and identify the appropriate BPS model fLOD for making reliable conceptual stage decisions. A design competition case study was used to test usefulness of this approach in assessing risk, when going through an actual design process. This thesis also presents a novel approach for evaluating decision-making practices in an experimental manner in the BPS domain that can inform future policy making.

EPFL2020

Impact of facade details on the reliability of performance-based decisions for early-stage neighborhood designs

Minu Agarwal

EPFL2020

2012