The European building stock demands urgent renovation due to the age of the buildings, their expected lifetime, and their excessive energy consumption, which accounts for more than a third of the EU’s total emissions. However, the complexities involved, such as time, costs, and structural modifications, often discourage clients, tenants, and occupants from undergoing a building renovation process. Textile membranes, despite their long history in various architectural applications, have only been employed in façades in the last decades. Their intrinsic properties, such as lightness and flexibility, together with rapid assembly and low maintenance make these materials particularly suitable for façade retrofitting. Therefore, they are worth exploring as a way to promote the development of lightweight and easy-to-assemble façade products that could help overcome the current limitations of building retrofitting efforts. This paper aims to establish relationships between textile membranes and potential building retrofit applications. To this end, this study builds on the categorization of traditional façade retrofit strategies and proposes a new classification for textile façade retrofit products. The methodology includes a comprehensive literature review of textile properties and characteristics, along with a thorough assessment through case studies, of membrane use in façade applications. A sequential investigation leads to the main outcome of identifying three clear pathways for the development of new textile-based façade products for building retrofit.

Adaptive façades are multifunctional systems that are able to change their functions, features, or behaviour over time in response to changing boundary conditions or performance requirements. As one of the significant developments in the façade industry over the last decade, the adaptive façade offers an intelligent solution that can decrease energy consumption and potentially increase users’ comfort in a building. From an engineering perspective, these advanced technologies aim to improve the overall performance of the building while generating a better indoor environment for the users, but unfortunately, investigations show that this goal is not always achieved. This is why, to bridge this performance gap, we embark on a change of perspective in façade design, from a technology-centred to a human-centred one. This research emphasizes that, with their changeability aspects, adaptive façade technologies offer unique potential, although the design of such façades requires a deeper understanding of users. With this as its focus, this paper aims to identify the factors affecting the user experience in a working environment, considering the interactions of the user with building services and façade systems from a holistic point of view, in which façade-user relationships are to be distinguished, towards the larger aim of developing a human-centred approach for adaptive façade design.

The integration of decentralised building services into façade components presents advantages from functional and constructional standpoints. However, this integrated approach has not been massively implemented, having only stand-alone buildings and façade concepts as examples. This paper seeks to identify the main perceived problems at design, production and assembly stages of the facade development process, to generate new knowledge based on practical experience; and to discuss the perceived barriers to overcome in order to promote widespread building service integration in façade systems. The employed method was an exploratory survey addressed to professionals with practical experience in the development of façade systems for office buildings, situated at any stage of the process. The survey was conducted from mid-September to mid-November 2015 and was distributed both as an online form and in printed format among several professional and research networks related with façade design and construction. After the campaign, 133 questionnaires were received, comprising a final number of 79 valid questionnaires. Results show that the main problems of the overall process are related to coordination issues among different disciplines and stakeholders, while other problems such as costs and lack of knowledge have more impact on particular stages within the design and construction process.

This paper seeks to present a panorama of cooling related research in office buildings, categorising reported research experiences from the past 25 years in order to identify knowledge gaps and define current paths and trends for further exploration. The general goal behind this research is to support the design of sustainable office buildings in warm climates through examination of past experiences, thus the paper focuses on strategies at building level and specially related with façade design. Peer reviewed journal articles were selected as the source for the study, given the reliability of the information published under peer-review processes. Several queries were carried out throughout three online journal article databases (Web of Science, SCOPUS and ScienceDirect), considering published papers from 1990 onwards. The resulting article database was then explored trough descriptive analysis and in-depth review of some articles to expand on specific topics in order to thoroughly visualise scientific interest and tendencies within the field of study for the last 25 years. As results of the review it is possible to state the high current relevance of cooling research, having experienced an increase of publications under different climate contexts and varied topics ranging from passive to solar cooling, which is seen as a research field on its own. Also, in terms of research methods, software simulations seem to be the primary tool for cooling research, which makes sense for performance driven developments. On the other hand, the main knowledge gaps identified are the need for specific research regarding possibilities for application and architectural integration of cooling systems; the lack of articles addressing some specific cooling strategies, such as the use of evaporative and ground cooling; and the need for more information about the operation of cooling systems, especially taking users’ perception and their behaviour into account.