Adaptive fabric façade for a high-rise in Paris

The topic of this graduation project is the design of an adaptive fabric facade for a high-rise in Paris. The stimulus for this choice was the turn of nowadays towards lightweight materials and constructions, a trend that is growing tremendously. Glass facades always remain popular and are frequently used in all kinds of buildings. For instance, a great quantity of glass is used in curtain walls. Therefore, following the need of research for lightweight materials, alternatives for glass are being investigated and membranes can be an interesting solution. They offer a number of possibilities and have many advantages, such as a variety of transparency levels and the fact that they are extremely lightweight materials. Furthermore, this graduation project concerns an office building, which is a rather demanding building type, as it requires a building envelope that offers a high level of indoor comfort, in terms of thermal and acoustical insulation, as well as efficient solar control. Thus, taking all the above into account and the global growing interest towards membranes, which are mostly used as roof components until now, the decision of exploring the potential of such materials as the main part of a building envelope for an open-plan office building in Paris was taken. The graduation research has an experimental character, as it tackles several issues of a possible membrane facade element and it tries to answer the questions that are being raised throughout of the development of this thesis. Firstly, a literature research is conducted on the available materials, their physical and mechanical properties, their production and connection methods, their advantages and drawbacks in general. Subsequently, design aspects are taken into consideration concerning the building envelope and physical models are constructed in order to visualise the design. Furthermore, hand calculations are conducted for the thermal and acoustical performance of the under study membrane facade element and then software simulations are made in order to validate the results. Moreover, an actual acoustical test is attempted with several difficulties, though, that will be described later on. Finally, conclusions are drawn concerning the whole research and design. As it is evident in the end, although the proposed solution is proved to be rather successful, there is still space for improvement, as well as further research and development.