Building Facades

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.

As part of a US$1.5 billion expansion of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida, the world’s first guitar-shaped hotel has now opened, adorned with thousands of LED strips that can be choreographed into elaborate light shows.

A new banking headquarters in Lebanon is set to be both visually striking and community-focused. In addition, the misshapen ​chequered façade ​of the Banque Libano Francaise (BLF) building will actually help to keep the temperature inside comfortable.

Visitors to this year's London Design Festival will have the opportunity to see the largest GRID installation in the world –​ a modular cubic construction system that's used to create versatile structures. The installation will act as a façade and will wrap around existing trees and bushes.

Following on from its work on the Markthal in Rotterdam and the Chongwenmen M-cube in Beijing, MVRDV has unveiled plans for another retail-focused project. As you might expect, the design is both visually and spatially exciting, with an evaporating façade and a new public roof garden.

Vertical gardens may look great, but they typically require constant maintenance, automated or otherwise. Urban greening firm Treebox, however, has unveiled a new vertical garden than looks after itself. The Rain Garden uses no power and is sustained solely by rainwater.

A new 300,000 LED façade has been installed at the Allianz Arena, home of soccer powerhouse Bayern Munich. The façade is wrapped around the entire outside of the 71,137-capacity stadium, covering an area of of 26,000 sq m, and will be used to create dynamic and colorful light displays.