I've become absolutely obsessed
with these things. There are so many of these
rectangle things everywhere. Every new building. There, they're subtle.
They're there. Right over there. They're everywhere. There. OK, this isn't a fancy apartment building,
but look at this! Kohl's. Look at all those. If you're living in an apartment anywhere
from Minneapolis to Massachusetts you'll see a pattern of rectangles
on the facade just like this. Buildings used to look like this. Now they look like this. But all these rectangles and textures
are surface evidence of a hidden system that's changed buildings. Whether it's a big public development,
like a library or private development like apartment building you can find panels that
compose the facade. I'm Matt Hogan, and I'm a project architect
with Walter Parks Architects. And I'm Walter Parks, and I work at
Walter Parks Architects with Matt. So this building is in an old and historic district,
and so it has to fit in with the historic nature of the other buildings. And if you look at that building and you look
at the building behind you, there's a band the building behind you,
at the top of every window. And we have a band at the top
of every window. The running bond pattern mimics the bricks. We're developing a palette of exterior materials
that complement one another, but also hopefully relate in some way to the neighborhood
that the building is in. My name is Andrea Quilici, and I am a senior
associate at Quinn Evans Architects and I'm a designer. I mostly work on libraries. There are three projects
that we design at Quinn Evans. So Libbie Mill is located right at the center
of a new development. We terracotta, we use high performance
concrete panels so that looks like concrete. Varina is a very pastoral. It's open, it's next to a beautiful creek
that it's preserved. And then we get to Fairfield this is
much more suburban. We want selected material that in some way
resonate with this community. We want to have a material durable,
and we use the slate because it's a material that
everybody knows. The visual choices are different, but these
panels all serve a similar technical purpose. And they're all only available now because
of the evolution of building design during the 20th century. A number of trends have driven us towards
actually building car dealership and high rise apartment buildings in the same way
that we built houses in 1920. My name is John Straub and I'm a professor
of the University of Waterloo in both the Department of Civil Engineering and
the School of Architecture. A lot of serious houses that were meant to
be permanent before 1900 would have been built out of masonry, out of brick on brick. They would have had plaster
as an interior finish. Brick is great like a big sponge,
but it's super heavy and requires the expense
of a mason. Those 1920 houses represented a different
approach by using shingles that protected the house from water but weren't necessary
to hold it up. By the time we got to the Second World War,
even serious houses the houses for the town physician or mayor were now being built out of
wood framing lightweight systems. If I were to go and say, how did we build
a local school or community center in 1930 or even 1960, the answer would have been masonry. But at the same time, even big projects were
slowly shifting to lighter, more flexible systems. And as we got into the energy crisis, we even
started to care about their energy efficiency of how much it would cost
to heat and cool them. I'm the associate director of the
Pennsylvania Housing Research Center. We are a part of Penn State University in
the Civil Environmental Engineering Department. Our core vision is rooted in Pennsylvania. It's to help that industry build better homes
by making our buildings more energy efficient. There was a bit of a lag in how
we controlled moisture. That is where the panels come in. They're part of a system called
rainscreen cladding. It takes these high-tech insulated houses and adds an air gap between them
and a rainscreen. Often, the fiber cement panels that are so
recognizable, but other textures too. It doesn't support the whole structure. That's what the frame is for. Imagine hanging a picture
a half inch out from the wall. Panels are simply hung
on a track system. As this installation video from one popular
manufacturer, Nichiha, shows. That rainscreen keeps a lot of water out,
and what water does get through has time and space to dry in the gap. Instead of getting in the structure and rotting
it just like those New England shingles did, rainscreen cladding keeps water out. But does it also use airflow to create a more
environmentally efficient enclosure? Creating the airflow to make it more efficient
is its it's like vast— like it's literally nothing. It's a bee fart in a windstorm. But I would say that there's a couple of factors where depending on how you
look at the environment When I said that there's this trend to make,
to use lighter weight less material that is actually environmental. I mean, if you were to try and build the buildings
that are needed in the next 30 years around the world and make them out of
as many tons of material as we built them in 1940 the planet would just fall apart. A rainscreen is nothing more
than a concept, really. It's a system. It's not any one product,
it's not any one technique. It's an assembly and that can be applied
to commercial buildings just as much as it can be applied to residential buildings. This technical adjustment and
shifting thinking led to a big change in what the outside of a building
could look like. I mean, there was a time where
environmentally conscious building was with sort of on the fringe. And now I think because so many of these strategies
have rain screens, for instance, have become more mainstream, they're seen as best practice. Our clients are mostly build and hold guys. They're are long-term guys who want to hold
that asset and don't want it falling apart. They're really worried about
what it's going to be in 20 years. They've got a 25 year mortgage or
a 30 year mortgage. One of they key factors is, for example is construction time. What's interesting, for example, with this
system is the fact that you can enclose the building, dry in the building,
independently from the facade. So certainly availability of labor
is a big one. Cost is a big one as well. It has structural implications. Also, when you look at designing the structure
of the home, adding brick will change some of your details or require some additional
additional structural design. Easy to overcome, but any of those additional details
they start to add up. You see, if we think about the historic choices
architects had in 1960, pick another date. They didn't have a lot. It was stucco or it was brick. And then they had this sudden shock that they
could do things like concrete. And they had, like all 4 choices. They were like, their minds were just exploding
about the possibilities. That obviously could have completely
turned on its head today because somewhere from
the 1960s to the 2020s we've gone to having maybe 3 or 4
dominant cladding types for walls to having easy 40 or 50.
