Often the most obvious things are the hardest to see, and that could be said of the building envelope in our quest for climate-friendly real estate. Architectural trends over the past few decades have favored glass, prioritizing the facade’s aesthetic appeal and leaving the envelope’s functional aspects to take a backseat. Double or triple-pane glass does represent progress but many buildings, especially those constructed in the latter half of the 20th century, remain ill-equipped to handle the thermal demands placed on them. As buildings’ energy performance has taken center stage in the last decade, numerous innovations have emerged for windows, shading, and roofs but the spotlight still generally falls on HVAC, lighting, and other major building systems to find energy savings. In the same way we learned to view human skin as the body’s largest organ, it is about time we started to look at the building envelope holistically, as a system in its own […]