1. Issue XII | February 2016
frontale-india.com
INTELLIGENT FACADES
TO IMPROVE
SUSTAINABILITY & COMFORT
ARTICLES PAGE
External Movable Shading System (EMSS) as Intelligent
Facade for Indian Commercial Buildings by Kanagaraj
3
Intelligent facades to improve the sustainability & Comfort
by Parish Kapse
5
UTS’s unique Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, Australia by Frank
Gehry
6
Large cavities between glass panes are feasible! by
ift Rosenheim
8
PROJECT PAGE
Tree Hotel - Mirrorcube, Sweden by Tham & Videgård Arkitekter 11
The Umrao, Delhi by Studio K.I.A. 17
INDUSTRY NEWS
Veka India to expand in Gujarat 14
STUDENT’S CORNER
Intelligent facades to improve the sustainability & Comfort
by Parag Gupta
15

2. Facade and Fenestration News for India
Page 3 | February 2016 | Issue XII
While attending one of the conferences on building energy efficiency, one of my
collegue friend whispered to my ears “we are in the right business at the right
time”. Being a fresh enterprenur, I smiled at him by showing my agreement to his
expression. I feel that this is not only true for the professionals like me concerned
with conserving environment but also for our country in general; considering the
recent success of COP 21 summit and with the launch of several prime ministers
missions like AMRUT, smart cities, make in India and housing for all. Maintaining
the optimism, we expect that all these intiatives meet the country’s development
objectives with strong emphasis on frugal means and resource efficiency.
Around Indian independence (in 1910s to mid 1960’s), works of both national and
international designers exhibited attempt to balance the concepts of “Revivalism”
and “Modernism”. Some of the prominent projects during this time which exhibited
architecture with amalgamation of Indian traditions and modern design concepts
are:
- Rastrapathi Bhavan and Secreterait in New Delhi by Sir Edwin Lutyens and
Hebert Baker
- Landmark buildings in the Capital Complex of Chandigarh like Secrtarait
building, High Court building and Legislative building designed by Le Corbusieur
- Ravindra Bhawan in Delhi, Gandhi Memorial in Barrackpore designed by Habib
Rahman,
- IIT Kanpur and CSIR building in Bengaluru by Achyut Kanvinde,
- Tata Institute of Social Sciences and Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai designed by
Durga Bajpai
- Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya at the Sabarmati Ashram by Charles Correa
In all the work mentioned above the designers had used building façades both as
an element for architectural expression and as a functional component to reduce
building heat ingress. But by the eighties with the boom in real estate and spurt
of developer built buildings, unfortunately we missed out on capitalising on
our inherited wisdom and/or keep pace with the global developments of high
perfromance of façade designs. The use of overhangs and balonies are considered
waste of material and space, anything which is specialised (like thermal mass and
insulation) and is not structural is dropped first from the bill of quantities. The
typical façade specified in most of the buildings today is clean high performance
glazing applied with no distintion to orientation, with minimum masonary, no
insulation, no thermal break frames and no shading. It is no surprise that many
veteran sustainability architects and consultants refer to these buildings as “near
naked buildings”. The very purpose of using glass for providing daylighting and
views gets defeated when one sees most of the internal shading devices down
during the daytime. In many of these buidings the perimeter spaces near to the
façade are often used for circulation or waiting areas due to reduced thermal and
visual comfort. Some designers got so much on board with the building exterior
aesthetic that they choose fancy color tinted glazing turning building occupants
brown and blue.
External Movable Shading System (EMSS) as Intelligent Façade for Indian
Commercial Buildings
In line with the current theme of this issue, I would like to present the concept
of external movable shading system (EMSS) as sustainable intelligent façade for
Indian commercial buildings. A window is a glazed aperture in the building façade
whose function is to reduce heat gain/loss, allow daylight and provide views while
minimising visual & thermal discomfort in the commercial buildings. Fenestration
acts as an interface disconnecting dynamic ambient conditions (temperature,
radiation, wind etc.) to maintain relatively stable indoor spaces comfort (thermal,
visual etc.) requirements. But it can only fulfil this “valve-function” if it has some
dynamic capacities. EMSS is one of the most efficient strategies to manage solar
heat gain and harness daylighting.
The history of using EMSS in India can be noticed way back in 1935 in the Golconde
dormitory building in Puducherry designed by Czech American architect Antonin
Raymond. A combination of moveable horizontal concrete louvres on the exterior
skin permitted ventilation and shading without compromising on privacy. The
detailing of operating the louver is so simple and effective that one can find most of
the louvers still in working conditions. Another more recent deployment of vertical
louver system can be seen in Safal Profitaire bulding in Ahemdabad designed by
Dr. Bimal Patel. This is a developer built multi-storey multi-tenant commercial
building. The vertical movable fins are mounted on 600 mm concrete ledge and
extend from slab to slab. Series of vertical fins are connected together to form an
External Movable Shading System (EMSS) as Intelligent
Facade for Indian Commercial Buildings
- Kanagaraj, Consultant, New Delhi
array and can be operated manually with single manual control. To show the belief
in the external movable shading system, the new one storey office of Swiss Agency
for Development and Cooperation (SDC) in New Delhi had incorporated both
motorised movable fabric shading and motorised movable lamellar blinds in the
building facade.
Fig 1: Golconde dormitory, Puducherry Fig 2: Safal Profitaire, Ahmedabad
Fig 3: Office of SDC, New Delhi*
EMSS is possibly a good example of concept of “multiple benefits, single cost”
proposed by Amory Lovins, renowned environmental scientist and ardent advocate
of Integrated Design Process. Installing EMSS external to the windows make them
effective in blocking the undesired solar radiation. External movable lamellar blind
(EMLB) when used with double clear glass is able to modulate the properties of
fenestration (best combination of U-value, SHGC, Visible light transmittance) to
meet the desired indoor comfort requirements. EMLB can have dual orientation,
where the bottom part conncted to visual pane controls the glare and the top part
connected to daylight pane allow light to reflect into the space ceiling.
Fig 4: EMLB with dual fins orientation*

3. Facade and Fenestration News for India
Page 4 | February 2016 | Issue XII
Thecomforttemperatureperceivedbyhumanbeingiscalledopertativetemperature,
which is an average of “air temperature” and “mean radiant temperature”
(temperature of surfaces around). A simulation study conducted under Indo-
Swiss Building Energy Efficiency Project (BEEP) compared two perimeter office
spaces, one with high performance glazing with no shading and another with
external movable blinds with double clear glazing. The results showed that the case
EMSS with double clear glass require 33% less air flow rate to maintain desired air
temperature (comparing figure 5(a) and 5 (c)) in the perimeter office space and
provide comfortable glass radiant tempeatures (comparing figure 5 (b) and 5 (d)).
Automation further augments the capabilities of EMSS e.g. the system can be
controlled by local weather station measuring incident solar radiation, wind speed,
precipitation etc. Once the radiation is above a threshold level (say 120W/m2)
the blinds come down, in case of high wind speed or rain the EMSS get safely
retracted to its garage, the perimeter artificial lighting diming control can be inter-
locked to the operation of blinds, manual overide option can be made available for
maintaining security and privacy etc. Needless to add that all of above functions
can easily be integrated into the BMS of advanced buildings.
For wide spread adoption in India, EMSS has to address specific concerns like
increased level of dust & pollution, high temperature, precipitation, vandalism by
rodents & birds and most importantly product cost. Majority of the issues can be
addressed by adapting robust design and by provision of warranty/maintenance
offer by the EMSS manufacturers. The cost of EMSS could be made affordable, if
the products are manufactred in India. This would be aligned with prime minister’s
missions on “Make in India” and “Skill India”
To end the article, I would like to mention couple of more ideas on EMSS by
Andreas Binkert, Senior Swiss Architect and founder of SwissProBlinds, a start-up
attempting to introduce EMSS to India..
- Application of EMSS would be pronounced, if in addition to energy efficiency
strategy it can also become an energy gerneration component by integrating BIPV
on it.
- Extending the concept of EMSS to intelligent city, imagine a city where all the
building facades are with EMSS and they can communicate with city’s weather
station and individual user comfort preferences, with supervisory control the
operation of EMSS can be optimised based on occupant comfort, energy efficiency
and energy production. This would call for real attempt of system integration.
Image Credit: Figure 3-5: Indo-Swiss Building Energy Efficiency Project (BEEP)
About the author:
Kanagaraj holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture and Master
of Science by Research in the area of “Building Energy Efficiency”
from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. He has
around 7 years experience and until June 2015, he was working
as a Senior Programme Officer at Greentech Knowledge Solutions
Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi, which has been appointed as Indian Project
Management and Technical Unit (PMTU) for the Indo-Swiss
Building Energy Efficiency Project (BEEP).
From July 2015 onwards, he is working as an Independent Building Energy
Efficiency Consultant. He intends to focus on mainstreaming “integrated design”
for realising high performance buildings.
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