The Importance of Testing Activities for a “New” Generation of Building Envelope

Abstract

AbstractThe construction sector is considered, directly or indirectly, one of the pillars for the application of technological solutions to rise the quality levels of building envelopes. The need to realize new processes capable of “dynamically” reading the responses of the built systems becomes an essential action to understand how the dynamics of climate change determine and trigger evident effects on the built environment. In this scenario, the contribution describes the experimental research activities on a curved facade—carried out at the TCLab Section of Building Future Lab of the Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria—to verify its performance responses to extreme events according to specific standardized protocols. Therefore, this study focuses on the building envelope, as the main subsystem through which leakage occurs, not only in terms of thermal and dynamic fluxes, but of air and water permeability. Testing activities, nowadays of fundamental value for climate change phenomena, allow to predict the behavior of the built environment and at the same time to evaluate alternative solution. The research efforts go toward defining a design methodology for a new generation of building envelopes, capable of reacting to different contextual conditions by raising the environmental and performance quality according to adaptive dynamics. From the tests carried out, the results take the form of test protocols, giving real added value to research and implementing applied experimentation actions with highly reliable results.