Building Facades

There's a whole giant structure with remarkable details behind the glass, but we're all really here for this building's striking facade. This is the Glasshouse Theatre, a new performance venue unveiled last week in Brisbane.

A roof paint that can cool your home and pull fresh water straight out of the air? It's within reach, as scientists scale up production of a new kind of paint-like coating that shields roofing from the sun's rays and harvests dew from its surface.

Using intricate geometry found in nature and refined through aerospace and biomedical design, scientists have now 3D-printed these forms into concrete to boost strength and capture carbon – creating a scalable material that benefits people and planet.

Form following function is an important principle in architecture, but few buildings lean into the idea quite as hard as this office for a pipe distribution company which appears to be almost totally made from metal pipes.

MAD Architects' One River North high-rise draws inspiration from the surrounding landscape and is defined by a facade that's cracked open to reveal a "Canyon" area that lets residents take a stroll along a mountain trail.

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 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.

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.