Building Enclosure Consulting

Simple, hang your sailboat from your balcony.

Famous Apple store before Hurricane Sandy.

Assorted ways of forcing pedestrians to take a picture.

Just wrap it. This is what was done with an entire village in Soviet Union prior to an anticipated drivethrough by the President Putin.

No, this is not an ATM for equestrians, or door for a conveyor belt. These are examples of the uncoordinated facade design, which is surprisingly frequent.

Too much transparency may reveal skeletons in a closet and much more…

Note the dark cracks originating from the upper window corners…

I guess there is not much attention to detail possible with a ~30ft telescopic pole.

Here is a yawning cat in a window in the Rotterdam Cube House, designed by architect Piet Blom.

Technically speaking, this is not a window, it’s a skylight, due to its tilt.

Cats have the uncanny ability to jump vertically to negotiate a window via its transom, which is normally ventilated. This is a nice, handmade, wooden, compartment window, a superior design developed in early 20th century, affording good thermal and acoustic properties.

Frosty patterns and ice forming in the vessel standing on the sill.

A little background for our American friends:

Europeans suffer from excessively air-tight living spaces (while Americans still busily try to figure out how to increase the air tightness). The typical perimeter hardware of an European window allows for untying the window, securing it with a small gap at the top. In this case, it was not enough for the occupant of the space. Please note the mitered corners of the sashes and glazing bars, which allow for continuous perimeter seals. We will see them in America perhaps in ten years.

In the battle between thermal and visual comfort, the thermal wins.

with a window with outswinging wooden shutters.

Old wooden window with split panes, square cut corners, and wooden lintel. The wall below the sill is built of stone, and the wooden sill and bottom rails of sashes are rotten and covered with moss.

How to invigorate a boring hotel facade, and make people buzz about it? Simple.

Apparently, the fabricator got a wrong width, and the only way to install the window, was to place it diagonally.

Apparently, the fabricator confused height with width, resulting in this in-swinging side-by-side window installed wrong way.

A profession thriving when an alarm clock was hardly affordable.

Wooden compartment window with metal corner keys.