Designing the Exterior Wall - An Architectural Guide to the Vertical Envelope (Hardcover)

Designing the Exterior Wall presents the basics of building science along with a prescribed set of details to help architects understand why buildings fail and how to design them to be more durable.

Covering everything from theory to actual construction, this insightful guide presents a thorough examination of a variety of construction and cladding types that illustrate the science and aesthetics of building envelopes. It offers helpful tools demonstrated in numerous actual projects set in a variety of climates; identifies proven strategies and pitfalls to avoid through successful and unsuccessful case studies; and provides useful checklists to assist professionals in the real world.

Designing the Exterior Wall features many recent exemplars of building skins--from big-budget projects by star architects to finely crafted cladding built with more modest budgets--that are varied in form, surface, and colors, including: Frank Gehry: Experience Music Project (thin metal skins and amorphous forms) Arquitectonica: Western New York at Times Square (glass curtain walls of 1,000 permutations) NBBJ Architects: Seattle Justice Center (double facade) Mario Botta: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (thin brick in precast panels) Miller/Hull Partnership: Olympic College, Shelton Campus (MDO plywood cladding) Brand + Allen Architects: Glassworks Condominium Homes (terra cotta rainscreen cladding)

Designing the Exterior Wall offers architects complete and reliable guidance for advancing the design of exterior walls by examining design failures and testing new ideas.