2011 - Façade Retroits The Dilemma of The Highly Glazed High-Rise
2011 - Façade Retroits The Dilemma of The Highly Glazed High-Rise
ABSTRACT
The post-war building boom in the mid-twentieth century produced the irst crop of glass curtain
walled ofice towers. This trend has continued through the decades, growing to include highly
glazed residential towers in the urban environment. This building type represents a problematic
component of the existing building stock. Many of these high-rise towers are now thirty to forty
years old or more. Moreover, the curtain wall technology of the time would be regarded as
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signiicantly substandard today. Improving energy consumption in the existing building stock will
require the retroitting of many, if not most, of these facades. While many buildings are currently
undergoing energy retroits, the scope of the renovation often stops short of the façade because of
the relatively high cost and the potential disruption to ongoing building operations. Even when the
façade is included in a energy retroit program, the options for approaching the façade element are
often unclear. This paper will examine the dilemma presented by the façade retroit, and explore
the complex issues related to this component of a building renovation.
1 INTRODUCTION
The statistics are well known: buildings consume more energy than any other commercial sector,
including transportation, accounting for nearly 49% of all energy use and 77% of all electricity,
while responsible for 47% of greenhouse gas emissions. Meeting the aggressive goals for energy
reduction established by such initiatives as the White House Agenda and the 2030 Challenge will
require energy retroits to the existing building stock on a widespread scale. The building stock is
comprised of a wide variety of building types, many of which present very particular problems with
respect to retroit. None are more challenging, however, than those presented by the tall building
façade.
The statistics are often repeated:
• Buildings consume more energy than any other sector.
• 76% of building energy comes from fossil fuels.
• Building energy use is growing faster than any other sector.
• The building sector produces 47% of all green house gases.
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Tall buildings are virtually synonymous with highly glazed curtain wall façade systems, especially
those constructed from the mid-twentieth century onward. Many of these buildings were constructed
during post-war boom times in the 1960s and 1970s, and are approaching 40 years of age and older.
Insulated glass warranties are typically 5 to 10 years, with the products having a life expectancy of
20 to 30 years. Similar durability can be expected from many of the sealants and gasket materials
used to provide the weather seal. Nor was this emergent curtain wall technology particularly
robust to begin with: problems with water penetration and air iniltration were common, thermal
performance was often miserable resulting variously in condensation, unwanted heat transfer,
and general discomfort to building occupants. Meanwhile, there have been many developments
in curtain wall technology over the past 3 decades involving progressive design technique, high
performance materials, and advanced fabrication processes.
These factors combine to create a real opportunity in the retroit of tall buildings. Retroit is, quite
simply, the application of new technology to existing systems. Yet there remain many uncertainties,
and more questions than answers. Façade retroit, or re-clad, is expensive; does it make economic
sense? What are the programmatic options with a façade retroit? Is glass a blessing or a curse in
the building façade? What are best (and sustainable) practices in undertaking a façade retroit; what
means-and-methods and project delivery options are available? This paper attempts to provide a
framework for these issues suitable to furthering a comprehensive dialog that may yield answers to
these and other questions regarding the façade retroit of tall curtain wall buildings.
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Figure 1: The Lever House by SOM, 1951, and the Seagram Building by Mies van der
Rohe, 1954, across the street from each other in New York City, are iconic examples
of the building type discussed here. The Lever House has already required a remedial
retroit completed nearly a decade ago. (Lever House photo by Shankbone)
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There are other issues, as well. In addition to being a poor thermal insulator, glass is an equally poor
acoustical insulator. A signiicant threshold has been recently crossed, whereby the majority of the
global population now lives in densely populated urban environments. In the early decades of tall
buildings the applications were predominantly ofice towers and the urban centers cleared out in
the early evening as people returned to homes in the suburbs. Recent decades, however, have seen
the rise of many highly glazed residential towers within the urban context, where noise pollution
is a signiicant and growing concern, albeit one not particularly well understood or easily dealt
with. Nonetheless, today’s insulated, and particularly laminated, glass panel constructs possess
signiicantly improved acoustical properties as compared to those often used in early curtain wall
systems.
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Figure 2-3: Typical stack joint and vertical joint of unitized curtain wall system. Note
the split mullions. The split mullion replaces the simpler single mullions used in stick
type systems.
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3 THE RETROFIT OPPORTUNITY
So the problem of the poor performing, aging glass curtain wall is now the opportunity to combine
need with solutions in a façade retroit. Sustainable building practice will certainly recognize reuse
of these aging buildings as superior to a strategy of deconstruction, recycling and rebuilding.
Retroit supports a sustainable strategy of reuse. There is no question that many buildings of the
type addressed here could beneit signiicantly from a façade retroit, and there is equally no doubt
that recent material developments and technology can signiicantly improve their performance, and
likely their appearance.
Curtain wall framing systems have improved somewhat; the mullions are often thermally broken,
at least in colder climates, to prevent heat transfer through the mullion. However, much of the
opportunity for performance improvements resulting from façade retroit yields from two sources:
material advances in architectural glass, and increasing sophistication in façade design.
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produced by the loat process. The value-added post processing of raw loat glass has come to
dominate growth in the glass industry. Glass is variously heat-treated, laminated, coated, and built
up into insulated panels. Thin-ilm coatings, for example, have signiicantly improved the thermal
performance of glass in the building skin over the past 30 years. Ongoing improvements include
interlayer materials for laminating glass, and cavity enhancements of IGUs as provided by aerogels
and mechanical shading devices built into the cavity. Vacuum glass products are beginning to
appear on the market with super insulation properties provided by very shallow, evacuated cavities,
promising future multi-ply super-insulating vacuum glass units (VGUs) itting within the same thin-
skin envelope.
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in response to internal, external and programmatic factors (solar exposure, natural ventilation,
circulation, etc.), with the weather barrier but one among them. On either or both sides of the
weather barrier may be found sensors and controllers, operable blinds and shades, ixed louvers
and screens, and daylight redirecting devices such as light shelves.
The double-skin facade is a particular coniguration of deep skin in which a cavity is developed
between two skins, separated by a depth that can range from inches to feet. The cavity affords
opportunities for enhancing the thermal and acoustical performance of the wall, controlling glare,
and providing natural ventilation. In fact, a double-skin strategy may provide an optimum solution
for certain retroit applications, for reasons discussed later.
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Figure 5: Working within the deep cavity of a multi-story double skin system, workers
install the outboard skin. A grating system divides the cavity at each loor level to
provide maintenance access without restricting airlow.
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architectural glass that must be replaced in the existing building stock if energy eficiency goals
are to be achieved? The complexity of the problem is evident in the example of the low-e coatings
that have so dramatically and effectively improved the thermal performance of glass. The coatings
are comprised of many layers of different heavy-metal oxides in combination to produce speciic
performance and appearance (color, relectivity) attributes. Even if a process can be developed
to effectively clean the glass of the coatings, another challenge remains in what to do with the
metal-oxide soup resulting from the process. There are solutions to these problems, no doubt,
but there are also costs associated with these solutions. Current costing models used in payback
and lifecycle analysis do not account for the cost of recycling, a fundamental requirement for
sustainable building practice.
Considerations of sustainability necessarily embrace a long-term timeframe. Another effect on the
sustainability of glass in the building skin resulting from the value-added processing of glass is
the durability of the resulting materials. Float glass can last for hundreds of years in the building
envelope. Glass coatings can fail through oxidation and weathering, compromising performance
and appearance, and considerably shortening the effective lifetime of the material. The same is
true of laminating and insulating processes. Laminations can fail and discolor, and the seals of IGUs
can fail allowing condensation to occur within the unit cavity. Manufacturer’s warranty for these
products is typically in the range of 5 years, with superior product warranties running from 10 to
12 years. In fact, in the absence of fabrication defects or damage during installation or use, the
materials will likely last well beyond the warranty period, but their lifespan is signiicantly less than
raw loat material.
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Figure 7: With over 10,000 landills in the United States, it is imperative that future
building façade retroits maximize material reuse and recycling strategies.
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Figure 8: The Javits Convention Center in New York City is currently undergoing a
façade retroit involving the removal and replacement of the entire façade system.
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6 CONCLUSIONS
Façade retroit thus represents a unique process, signiicantly different from that of new construction,
for which there is a tremendous looming need of some importance. It is critical that this retroit
work be carried out eficiently and effectively. Yet this remains largely undeined territory. Everything
from contracting strategies to system designs and means-and-methods considerations involve
considerable ambiguity, and sustainability issues are problematic in the extreme. Following are the
primary conclusions derived from this exercise.
1. The looming requirement for facade retroit should be regarded as a fundamental
infrastructure problem; energy eficiency and carbon reduction goals cannot be achieved
without addressing this problem.
2. Meeting the demand will be costly and complex, with a high potential for the process being
wasteful.
3. There is urgent need for deining appropriate retroit strategies, evaluation criteria for their
application, and the deinition of means and methods for the implementation of the various
strategies, possibly taking the form of best-practice guidelines for the various stakeholders.
4. Design practices for new facades that anticipate and accommodate the eventual need for
retroit could facilitate future retroit requirements. Façade systems should be designed to
facilitate the retroitting of new materials and technology as developments occur.
5. Sustainable facade retroit practices must be developed; a focus on material reuse is
imperative to avoid illing landills with discarded façade materials, particularly glass.
6. New architectural glass recycling (not down-cycling) technologies are needed.
7. Advanced facade solutions using raw loat glass should be pursued because of the
uncompromised material life and the potential for easy recycling. Double-skin strategies
may accommodate this in certain applications.
8. Costing models that factor in the environmental cost of damaging construction practices
and the true cost of energy are badly needed to correct inaccurate perceptions of long
payback periods for energy eficient technology.
9. Legislative measures regarding building energy and carbon performance will be required
in the private commercial sector to achieve appropriate goals for energy use in existing
buildings within this sector.
REFERENCES
Architecture 2030. Accessed 3 January 2011 http://architecture2030.org, original data from U.S.
Energy Information Administration (EIA)
Wigginton, M. (1996). Glass Architecture. London: Phaidon Press Ltd.
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