Learning Facade Design through Case Studies
This semester is the second time for me to teach ‘Building Materials and Enclosures’ as it’s the new elective course for architecture students. I should be more prepared than last year that I launched it for the first time, I think. But it’s not an easy task because I have to teach practice class online due to COVID-19 pandemic. One of the class objectives is to encourage my students to apply their knowledge about building materials and enclosures to their architectural design projects. They need to understand criteria and use of building enclosures to protect the building from environmental conditions. The students not only study each type of building materials and how they are put together to become facade components and systems, but also learn to understand their properties, construction constraints, and behavior well enough to apply them to their design projects.
Learning from case studies is crucial before they can adjust the enclosure details for their own design. Therefore, various types of building envelope were studied whether they were made of wood, brick, concrete, metal, glass, or advanced materials. Reference buildings could be in Thailand and elsewhere. For final project assignment, instead of taking pictures from internet which wouldn’t help my students understand scale and dimension of building envelope clearly because they couldn’t relate it to human scale, I assigned each of them to visit a case study building and take photos. By considering that they might not be allowed to get inside the building to understand how section of the envelope they chose served function of its room, they needed to select the case with architectural drawings: plans, elevations, and sections, available in books or online sources. The detailed envelope design is not necessarily provided by the sources but by their own experience after visiting the building.
After their observation, they were asked to produce 3D-scaled model of the building enclosure they selected with full material specification. This way I can see if they truly understand the construction of the facade as they know all dimensions and how each component was attached to one another. After studying all types of building materials and enclosures, from basic to advanced materials, the students were asked to select one type they are most interested in to apply with their own design project or changing the façade of the case study building to the new one. Even though students reflected that analyzing construction techniques and making 3D models to give construction details of each building enclosure type every week required a lot of hard work, final project presentation of this class showed that they still challenged themselves by using advanced materials or complex forms but solving construction problems with simple details they had learned through case studies.
