Building Envelope

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Now more than ever, it’s critical that we’re committed to embodied carbon reduction. To do this, AEC professionals need to focus on reducing the embodied carbon of materials and construction processes, which is often overlooked but crucial for overall carbon reduction

Increasingly, our schools need to be well-appointed places of modern learning and also durable structures in the event of natural disasters such as Florida’s seasonal hurricanes.

New coatings and sheens don’t always live and perform by the old rules. What is driving this innovation, and what are some examples of these new rule-breaking coatings? We’ll get to that.

In many cases, building envelope design is mostly a matter of aesthetics and costs. As attention to environmental issues grows, however, sustainability and energy-related concerns play an increasing role in these decisions. The push to reduce urban heat island effects is one of the most prominent of these concerns.

Our Summer issue is packed with sustainability topics, including the importance of adaptive reuse and the impact on the building enclosure.

Gabe Maser, Senior Vice President of Government Relations and National Strategy for the International Code Council, sat down with us to talk about Building Safety Month and the role of building codes in ensuring safe and resilient communities.

The following is an exhibit of over twenty tools (many of which are free) that can help your team examine, disclose, and optimize your next building project for embodied carbon. 

Clayton, Missouri’s Forsyth Pointe is a 1-million-square-foot office complex that has changed the city’s skyline, and given building and construction professionals many ideas for future projects. What lessons should people learn from this ultra-upscale development to apply to other modern building enclosures?

Rehabbing buildings with energy conservation in mind can be a massive undertaking, requiring a holistic exterior and interior approach to decrease buildings’ carbon emissions and energy consumption while minimizing disruption to current occupants. A deep energy retrofit is achieved when renovation activities reduce a building’s site energy usage by at least 40 percent.