The two sides of a double-skin facade: built intelligent skin or brand image scam?

Double-Skin Facade (DSF) buildings regularly appear in popular architectural journals and claims are made that the buildings are either ‘sustainable’, ‘green’, ‘eco-friendly’ or ‘intelligent’. This results in myths about the performance of buildings that are perpetuated by designers eager to maintain a brand image. A literature review of research on the performance of DSFs reveals that the vast majority of the analysis is carried out by simulation methods and that there is a lack of empirical evidence obtained from monitored buildings. This paper will present some early findings from buildings with DSFs that are currently being monitored in Auckland, New Zealand, to assess the contribution of a DSF to reducing the building’s heating and cooling load. It will also analyse the common simulation models to examine whether the models are a reasonable representation of reality. Initial evidence indicates that DSFs in sub-tropical climates offer less energy savings than predicted and could even contribute to increasing cooling loads. It is the hypothesis of this paper that a DSF has become a way in which an excessively glazed building in a warm climate can maintain its transparent architectural image while still claiming to be ‘green’ but with little evidence of any energy savings.