Thermal Breaks and Energy Performance in High-Rise Concrete Balconies

Editor’s Note: Thermal bridging is a significant and under-explored issue in tall buildings, particularly where floor slabs are connected to balconies and facades. While the study described below is deliberately narrow in scope, we believe it raises issues of broad applicability for future designs. We note that even the most innovative facade technologies available today, such as the “raster facades” used on Tour Total, Berlin – a Finalist for the 2013 CTBUH Innovation Award – have yet to satisfactorily resolve the issue of bridging in a way that would make it broadly applicable and financially appealing to developers generally. North America lags behind Europe in this regard; I recently toured a LEED-Gold high-rise in Chicago that considered the issue, but found all the solutions on the market to be too expensive. We encourage further research and development in this vital field, so as to create more marketable and effective solutions. – Daniel Safarik, CTBUH