SIX TIPS FOR A GREAT FACADE

摘要

What makes for a great, or even just a good facade? One place to start is to ask what makes a bad one. Many of you will have your own horror stories, but a facade I wish I could forget is a block of flats near my home in north London (assuredly not the Chris Dyson Architects project pictured on the left). In theory, this block of flats is a building I'd have loved if everything had turned out right. It has a white steel exoskeleton with glazed balconies. Who cares if the conservative insist that only traditional materials will do for housing? Let the architects have their say. But the brackets for the horizontal balcony supports are visually too close together, I'd estimate at 900mm centres. Neither looks right as a circular hollow section (CHS). The straight and radiused CHS elements have clumsy mitred welded connections. Also too closely spaced are the balusters, which have been over-designed as thin steel-plate scimitars. The horizontal CHS members have white square patch connectors supporting the balcony decks, so closely spaced they resemble crenellations. They're spidery in an ungainly way, like the connections supporting the guardings, which manage to resemble green polycarbonate, despite being glass.