Post by Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft

Climate adaptation in urban environments has high priority. An often-overlooked aspect is the façade: we spend most of our time indoors, and the outer shell of a building therefore has a huge effect on livability, sustainability, and our health. Assistant professor AnneMarie Eijkelenboom puts the façade in the spotlight: “The challenge is to resolve comfort and climate resilience through the façade. With relatively small adjustments, significant gains can be made.” In the Netherlands, the focus over the past century has mainly been on keeping buildings warm in winter. Walls have been retrofitted with insulation, and new homes are built airtight to limit heat loss through drafts. While this is sustainable from an energy consumption perspective, it also has a downside: as summers become warmer, it can lead to an uncomfortable and even unhealthy indoor climate. “The Dutch tradition of designing façades with large windows calls for innovation in light of warmer summers,” says Annemarie. “Simply reducing window size to keep heat out has the drawback of letting in very little daylight during winter. A combination of façade adaptations, tailored to the context and housing type, is therefore the most effective approach.” Developments in façades are advancing so rapidly that some innovative solutions have hardly been applied yet, making it difficult to assess exactly how effective they are. This is where The Green Village comes in: the regulatory sandbox, open-air laboratory on the TU Delft campus. “Façade innovations align perfectly with the ambition to create passive comfort, prevent heat stress and flooding, and promote biodiversity,” says Hannah Sorgedrager, Project Manager for Climate Adaptation at The Green Village. Annemarie: “We see that the traditional division in construction between indoor and outdoor space is diminishing. The disciplines are increasingly connecting, creating greater coherence between how a building functions and how the surrounding environment contributes to comfort, and vice versa. At TU Delft, we are happy to take the lead in this.” Experiments and real-world testing, for instance at The Green Village and in existing homes, help further shape this integrated approach. As a result, the façade as a crucial link between inside and outside is getting its day in the sun.