Green building envelopes

As cities develop and expand, their green spaces are often the casualty. At the same time, as urban density increases so heat and pollution levels rise. Building envelope design needs to be responsive to these issues and effects.

Green building envelopes improve air quality and reduce pollution by filtering fine particles out of the air. They also minimise heat island effects and contribute to reduced noise levels.

Green building envelopes are achieved by considering a building’s position, its use, the proposed materials and client’s operational goals. We then explore ways a building’s external envelope can provide natural ventilation, with facades that reduce energy inputs while also contributing usefully to its active energy requirements. This design challenge provides opportunities to achieve new and innovative solutions.

A complete (and green) vision

We are also increasingly designing green building envelopes, to help clients operate buildings that can make a significant contribution to solving current problems relating to storm water management, particulate matter pollution and inner-city overheating.

Natural diversity

We offer a wide range of green building envelopes including moss walls, tree façades, and urban agriculture initiatives such as vertical farming, beehives and wildlife corridors, which all help to deliver better air quality.

Green roofs greatly improve water management, enabling storm water retention with timely release to public drainage systems and minimising the need to build expensive infrastructural storm water facilities.

SolarLeaf façade is based on the idea to utilise bio-chemical process of photosynthesis for the design of energy efficient buildings and building clusters.

Developing the concept of SolarLeaf further, microalgae are cultivated in glass facade elements that generate heat for the building operation and biomass for the food and pharmaceutical industries.

One Melbourne Quarter - As part of the 6 star Green Star pathway and to push the building’s performance towards 5.5 star NABERS Energy, Arup prioritised passive design features including a high performance façade with optimised shading, insulated curtain wall spandrels, thermally broken double glazing, motorized internal blinds and an air tight building envelope.

Vertical Meadow

Vertical Meadow is an innovative and cost effective living wall system for temporary applications such as construction site scaffolding and hoardings. Plants and flowers can be grown from seed in-situ on a temporary mat that is easily fixed. Within two or three weeks the first shoots start to appear, eventually growing into a verdant vertical meadow transforming unsightly hoarding or scaffolding.

Exploring the potential

We collaborate with different disciplines to quantify the benefits of proposed green building envelopes, examining their potential to mitigate urban noise, air pollution and heat. This extensive research helps us measure impact including profitability of the solutions.

Natural energy

This is a question we’ve tried to answer through extensive research and real world application of our ideas. SolarLeaf is a bio-reactive cladding technology that uses algae and sunlight to harvest power within a building’s envelope.

As the world struggles to power itself without contributing to climate change, experiments like this could lead to the technologies we need.

The bioenergy façade

This research project is a further development of the SolarLeaf facade, the world’s first algae bioreactor facade, where microalgae are cultivated in glass elements that generate heat for the building operation and biomass for the food and pharmaceutical industries.

Case study

SolarLeaf

Façade technology continues to advance, with Arup at the forefront of its evolution. One major area of development is the conservation and generation of renewable energy from bio-reactive facades, as demonstrated by our SolarLeaf façade.

Unveiled as a pilot project at the International Building Exhibition (IBA) in Hamburg in 2013, the world´s first bio-reactive façade design generates renewable energy from algal biomass and solar thermal heat. The integrated system, suitable for new and existing buildings, was developed collaboratively by Strategic Science Consult of Germany (SSC), Colt International and Arup.