Training School 2016 in Hamburg

Modern building envelopes are high-tech components that must meet several requirements and limitations considering architecture/planning and structural performance, energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality, buildability and value. As a result, building envelope design has become a separate discipline, where building envelope engineers collaborate with other members of the design team in order to develop a facade that meets various requirements and constraints.

This next generation of facades (or building envelopes) consists of multifunctional and highly adaptive systems. A physical separator between the interior and exterior environment (i.e. the building envelope) is able to change its functions, features and behaviour over time in response to transient performance requirements and boundary conditions in order to improve the overall building performance.

The basic knowledge, required to design an adaptive facade, was presented in the first half of the summer school. In the second half of the summer school this knowledge was applied in a workshop, where groups of students are considered to create conceptually designed adaptive facades for given boundary conditions. International experts from the EU and Brazil gave the lectures and guided the workshop.

Around 60 Architectural Engineering and REAP Master students from the HCU and PhD students from 19 different countries were welcomed to participate in this summer school. Based on the results of the summer school, the HCU students prepared a final analysis of their conceptual design in a sketchbook format.