Building Enclosure Consulting

I will speak this Thursday 4/24/2014 at the BEC Fenestration Symposium in Raleigh, NC. All those who plan to come, please read this article about fenestration. It’s my old article about Glass Coolness published in The Construction Specifier in April 2013. We will talk about this stuff! See you there! Literature pertinent to the topics: Glass […]

As difficult as it is to imagine, buildings move. Introduction of curtain walls gave the buildings even more freedom to move. The peaceful rigidity of bulky bearing walls and relatively short spans of oversized structural members belong to the past. Today’s buildings move a lot more. In fact, the biggest single difference between curtain walls […]

 The need for access becomes obvious early, but not early enough. Adding window-washing equipment, for example, can come as a late surprise, affecting design, budget, and construction schedule.  This new article by Kaz and Mr. Jerzy Tuscher was printed in the May edition of Construction Canada. Kaz spent hundreds of hours hanging on the wrong side of a wall and […]

Facade Engineering – How To Design a Functional Building Enclosure – Free PDF The paper presents elementary concepts of façade engineering and focuses on areas typically overlooked by architects and engineers, chosen on the basis of observations derived from forensic investigations of failed assemblies, peer reviews of architectural documentation, and a façade engineering practice. A […]

This article is about building construction, and more specifically about application of the finite element analysis to heat transfer and energy sources design analysis of glazing by a consulting architect engineer. The growing performance requirements introduced gradually in building codes or accepted voluntarily in order to achieve a recognized certification (e.g. LEED)  force architects to include […]

In the recent floods in New York and Miami, we saw pictures we hoped we would never see again: abandoned, submerged cars, inundated houses, and gigantic traffic jams. Human memory works in a mysterious fashion: we tend to remember good times, while we push away bad memories. This may explain the irrational exuberance evidenced in some new construction […]

This is the BEST3 Conference paper. The DVD will follow soon. Its working title is  “Skylight 101, or what you have always wanted to learn about sloped glazing.” It presents typical challenges and solutions associated with sloped glazing and skylights,

Windows are as old as buildings, the word itself derived from the ancient Norse language in times when Vikings raided North Europe. How to design a window? How should an architectural glass be chosen?  Vikings are long gone, and we found the knowledge remains common among architects in the North Europe, but has not spread much […]