Climate-adaptive facades: An integral approach for urban rainwater and temperature management

The increase in the world's population, growing urbanisation and climate change are having a particular impact on the built environment. Extreme heat and heavy rainfall events affect urban architecture with considerable personal injuries and material damage. Building envelopes cover a considerable part of urban exterior surfaces and have a significant leverage effect on the climate resilience of buildings and cities. The research described in this paper focuses on facade concepts which incorporate climate-adaptive functions, thus addressing the missing integration of these issues in the design of most of the envelopes in urban areas. The so-called HydroSKIN, that has been developed at ILEK within the Cooperative Research Centre 1244 on adaptive skins and structures, provides a retention surface in the building envelope. It combines rainwater harvesting (RWH) and evaporative cooling by means of a lightweight facade element with a minimal amount of embedded mass, energy, and CO2 emissions.