Building Facades

The Upper House is defined by an eye-catching timber facade that twists as it rises. The building riffs on indigenous Australian culture and also boasts significant sustainability features, as well as thousands of plants.

As 3D-printed architecture continues to grow in popularity, we're seeing more creative uses for the tech. This example comes from Studio RAP and uses a 3D printer to transform a retail store with a decorative knitted fabric-like ceramic facade.

MVRDV has been commissioned to extend an airport in the Czech Republic. In response, the firm has designed three buildings with intricate facades that incorporate solar power and satellite images of the country.

MVRDV has completed work on a retail store for jeweler Tiffany's in Singapore's Changi Airport. It aims to catch the eyes of weary travelers with a 3D-printed coral-inspired facade made using recycled plastic partly sourced from fishing nets.

Contaminar Arquitectos takes an unorthodox but visually striking approach to keeping the Quinta do Rei 18 home a comfortable temperature. The firm has wrapped the residence in a twisting concrete facade that protects it from the sunshine in Portugal.

Sava has revealed plans for an ambitious renovation of a moldy old retail building in Vietnam. The project will be focused on increasing light and views inside and will be fronted by an eye-catching facade of stacked greenery filled planters.

A large percentage of a building’s energy usage is consumed by heating and cooling, but a new dynamic shading system could help. Inspired by the skin of krill, the system uses cells of blooming pigment that can block light on demand.

Beautifully designed, energy-generating bio-panels that suck up carbon dioxide and pump out biomass for use as fuel or fertilizer – that's the idea behind Mexican startup Greenfluidics and its nanotech-enhanced microalgae bioreactor building panels.

Dubai isn't lacking in amazing buildings, but the Museum of the Future is sure to turn heads. The building takes the overall form of a big silvery eye and sports an intricate facade that's covered in Arabic calligraphy.

Commissioned to create a new aluminum museum in Thailand, local architecture firm HAS design and research produced an eye-catching facade that's made up of tens of thousands of individual aluminum pieces to form a porcupine-like outer shell.

Heating and cooling buildings is a major consumer of energy, especially older ones that weren’t built with modern energy efficiencies in mind. Now Fraunhofer engineers have developed a modular solar-powered facade that can heat or cool rooms.

Along with benefits such as air purification, "living walls" are also said to help regulate the temperature within new buildings which they're built into. A study now indicates that they have the same effect when added to older, existing structures.