Characteristic of a Mies Van Der Rohe prototypical solution to housing was the belief that these methods and technologies could make a difference in all people’s lives - that what worked elsewhere could also work in Newark. Now 50 years old, these buildings are in need of repair. In particular, their poorly performing building envelopes do not provide adequate interior environmental comfort levels and consequently result in increased energy demands to compensate for this ineffectiveness. The apartment buildings’ owners have proposed to undertake this documentation, analysis, and design project to determine options for the upgrade of the buildings’ curtainwall system.
A building’s exterior envelope responds to both environmental conditions and human needs. It balances internal and external environments by protecting the interior from the external natural forces of sun, rain, snow, wind and air and modulating the transfer of heat and light thru its material surface(s) and the openings made in it. An effective building envelope is one that modulates environmental difference/change, responding to both internal and external fluctuations in heat gains and losses. The passive design of the building envelope aims to use sunlight to light and heat the building in the winter, while protecting the interior from solar heat gain and glare in the summer. As such, it is necessarily adaptive in nature. Additionally, this environmental interface performs as the most visible part of a building and consequently as its primary identity.
