The Ecologies of the Building Envelope: A Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces

By Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Jeffrey Anderson

The Ecologies of the Envelope theorizes the building envelope as a literal embodiment of the social, political, technological, and economic contingencies which have become embedded within it over the last century, analyzing the historical lineages, heroes and villains that helped define the complex material ecologies we see within the envelope today.

While the façade is one of the most thoroughly theorized elements of architecture, it is also one of the most questioned since the end of the 19th century. Within the discipline of architecture, the traditional understanding of the façade focuses primarily on semiotic and compositional operations (such as proportional laws and linguistic codes), which are deployed on the building's surface. In contrast to this, our material and environmental theory of the envelope proposes that the exponential development of building technologies since the mid-19th century, coupled with new techniques of management and regulation, have diminished the compositional and ornamental capacities of the envelope in favor of material, quantitative, and technical performances. Rather than producing a stylistic analysis of the façade, we investigate the historical lineages of the performances, components, assembly types, and material entanglements that constitute the contemporary building envelope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Actar
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638409489

Alejandro Zaera-Polo

Alejandro Zaera-Polo is an award-winning architect and a tenured professor at Princeton University. His career has consistently merged the practice of architecture with continued theoretical and academic engagement. He was trained at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (Hons), and holds a Master in Architecture from the Harvard GSD (with Distinction). He worked at OMA in Rotterdam (1991–93), prior to establishing FOA in 1993, and AZPML in 2011. He was the dean of Princeton School of Architecture (2012–14) and of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam (2000–5). He was the inaugural recipient of the Norman Foster professorship at Yale University School of Architecture (2010–11), and has lectured widely and internationally at institutions such as the AA School, Columbia GSAPP, UCLA, and Yokohama University. His texts can be found in many professional publications such as El Croquis, Quaderns, A+U, Arch+, Log, AD and Harvard Design Magazine, and many of them are collected in The Sniper’s Log (2012).

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