From Steel and Glass Envelopes to Sustainable façades: Evolution of Intelligent Shading Systems

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-964-3_10How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Sun-Shading; Sustainability; Building façades; Solar-control; High-Performance Envelope

Abstract

The evolution of building envelopes from opaque structures to transparent façades of metal and glass transformed architectural style with the modern movement, but also induced various negative environmental impacts. The latter building envelopes, though celebrated for their aesthetics, daylighting, and views, also contribute significantly to building operational energy use, as well as embodied energy content. To address these impacts, there has been an emergence of emphasis on energy-efficient measures through high-performance building skins of which shading design presents itself as an important component. In recent years, these have begun to be reused as an effective passive strategy to enhance envelope performance, while allowing effective daylighting and views, by means of efficient solar control.

This paper thus traces the historical development of building envelopes, from the steel-and-glass archetypes to high-performance façades with intelligent shading systems. It highlights initiatives, such as the ‘Universal’shading device from the School of Planning & Architecture (SPA), New Delhi, Design Innovation Centre, that demonstrates a “modular, affordable, sustainable, and creative” shading system that can suit varied climatic contexts, building orientations, opening sizes, and fenestration typologies. Through a discussion of such adaptive design potentials, this study points to the emergence of a new sustainable architectural style.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shweta Manchanda
AU  - Shivendra Shivendra
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/31
TI  - From Steel and Glass Envelopes to Sustainable façades: Evolution of Intelligent Shading Systems
BT  - Proceedings of the Conference Series on Sustainable Architecture Circular Economy (SACE 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 194
EP  - 212
SN  - 3005-155X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-964-3_10
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-964-3_10
ID  - Manchanda2025
ER  -