Building Facades

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.

A new reactive LED façade has been installed at the Hotel WZ Jardins in São Paulo, Brazil. The façade responds to sounds, air quality and people's interaction with a smartphone app. It is part of a project that explores the "Hacked City" and how technology can bring positive change to cities.

An interactive façade is to be wrapped around the south-east corner of a building at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto. Its design is based on mapping data from the local area. Passers-by will be able to read information embedded in the façade by photographing it.

A building in Nanjing, China, has become a colorful addition to the city's skyline. The International Youth Culture Centre features an LED system from Philips that has 700,000 nodes and a palette of 16 million colors. Despite this, it reportedly costs less than €114 (US$122) per day to light.

Building façades are often designed solely with the intention of being aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes, though, their aim is to deliver a function on top of their form. The Grand Théâtre d'Albi has one such façade, designed to be both good looking and to provide some shelter from the elements.

The BioSkin that coats Tokyo's NBF Osaki Building in Tokyo integrates evaporative cooling to keep its surface temperature down, and having won the CTBUH Innovation Award award earlier this month, could help tackle rising urban temperatures around the world.