The Perforated Building's Envelope: Guiding the early design phases

Abstract

Perforation of building envelope is historically connected -in some circumstances- to the traditional architectural models (i.e. the ‘Mashrabiyya’) that consist of archetypical perforated elements to play technological, environmental, socio-cultural, or economic roles, reflecting the community values, its economic situation, and the occupants’ environmental needs. Nowadays, the perforation of building envelope presents a global contemporary architectural trend, which had a greater emergence since the beginnings of the 21st century, following the emergence of the digital technology that led to the development of the construction techniques, materials, implementations, buildings performance and appearance, etc. The research significance relies on the need to develop a holistic guide for designing this type of perforated building envelope, as there is no evident process for guiding at least the early design phases. The few recent related types of research are mostly discussing specific environmental issues of the perforated envelopes and neglecting the consideration of socio-cultural, the economic, and the technological aspects altogether alongside the environmental ones. For this reason, and due to the importance of guiding this rising trend, the research aims at extracting some general guidelines that can be followed and considered by architects and architecture students in the early design phases of perforated envelopes, in the future. The guidelines extraction process depends on analyzing a selected representative sample of contemporary cases of perforated building envelope, taking the technological, environmental, socio-cultural, and economic indicators into consideration for conducting and constructing the analytical model which has been adopted after certain testing and validation processes. The holistic analysis has led to the extraction of sixty general guidelines, those have been developed by constructing a specific questionnaire to evaluate them by different experts who have related design work, and also by some researchers those have published related scientific works. As a vision for the future related work, a contextual appropriateness of the guidelines can be studied in order to specifically integrate and interrelate them in the design solutions by considering a specific community circumstances and specific climatic parameters.