The Facades+ conference series comes to Nashville for the first time on April 21. The event’s program, held at the Westin Nashville, features nine expert-led presentations assembled with the help of co-chair Dave Powell, principal at HASTINGS. During breaks, make sure to stop by the Methods & Materials Gallery where you can speak with representatives of 21 building product manufacturers. They can help you specify your next project!
Stacked: Alcove Facade 900 Church Street, Nashville
The symposium kicks off with a presentation from Goettsch Partners (GP) of Alcove, a recently delivered residential tower in the Nashville Yards development. Architects from GP will be joined on stage by representatives from the developer, Giarratana, and the project’s structural engineer De Simone. The panel will discuss the tower’s window wall system, which was shaped to create groupings of stacked, shifting cubes. This presentation will delve into the technical details and construction documentation, as well as the custom building maintenance system which was designed to clean the tower’s complex surfaces.
Sustainable Skylines: Climate-Responsive Envelope Design in Supertalls
Dominyka Voelkle, associate at Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), will travel from New York City to provide an update on the biophilic facade systems at work across the firm’s project portfolio. The presentation will cover BIG’s buildings for the Google campus in California, The Spiral, a recently completed super tall building in Manhattan, as well as CapitaSpring, a mixed-use high rise in Singapore. Voelkle will discuss the technical implementation of green roofs, terraces, and solar roofs in these projects.
Kronos to Kairos: Architectural Expressions of Time
HASTINGS, the event’s co-chair firm, will present their work on a new headquarters building for K-LOVE, a Christian radio station based in Nashville. The building’s concept emerged from two ancient Greek approaches to time, Kronos and Kairos. The former entails a standard, linear interpretation, while the latter refers to phenomenological interruptions in time’s linear progression. On the building, these concepts appear through the composition of the precast concrete facade, where vertical symmetry is periodically interrupted by chamfered recessions.
Building Enclosure | Building Community
In the next spotlight, Anne Marie Duvall Decker, principal at Duvall Decker, will speak to the architectural challenges of building in economically depressed communities in the Southeast, arguing that, in this instance, the delivery of healthy and functional environments takes precedence over flamboyant style. Architects must always design within a budget, however this constraint is even more limiting when designing for disadvantaged communities, requiring a careful consideration of priority and intent.
High-Performance Enclosure Technologies
Diana Hun, group leader for building envelope materials research at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, will present her team’s work on envelope retrofit optimization. The lab has developed a software which can provide extremely precise measurements and construction directions for re-cladding existing structures with more energy efficient cladding systems. Hun will demonstrate the program, which uses digital twin technologies to provide precise construction instructions.
Shaping a Sustainable Future: A USGBC Market Update
Dustin Mason, associate director at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), will provide a brief update on the organization’s work, including a preview of the upcoming roll out of LEED v5. Additional topics will include the council’s green building initiatives, which are occurring at both the local and national level, and a new strategic plan to transform the building market.
Advancing Sustainable Practices and Embodied Carbon in Construction
This roundtable brings together experts from across the AEC Industry to discuss the increased usage of mass timber in new construction. Scott Brown, DPR Construction’s resident timber expert, Ripley Bickerstaff, director of business development at Hoar Construction, and Laura Hollier, associate at HASTINGS, will take the stage to discuss the challenges and advantages of the material as mass timber becomes more common in the Nashville market.
A Tale of Two Facades
The final presentation of the day will be delivered by Z Smith, principal at EskewDumezRipple, covering the firm’s work on Center of Developing Entrepreneurs (CODE), a modularly constructed development in Charlotte, and Tech Square 3, a tower built for Georgia Tech. These two projects, despite their differences in scale and massing, employed similar techniques to expedite construction and achieve high energy performance standards.
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