Towards a contemporary vernacular building envelope

Technology tends to standardize architecture, striving to make it uniform and resulting in a globalization of the architectural thought. The trend of contemporary architecture is not characterized by adapting to the urban or natural context. As such, new buildings are frequently put in opposition to their urban and natural context, which is often completely ignored. Solving this issue requires vernacular architectural solutions. The research presented in this paper aims to adapt technologically advanced concepts to new vernacular façade concepts.
The study first provides an overview of how different factors (such as climate, location, local materials and socio-cultural factors) had influenced the vernacular building envelope. Furthermore, vernacular building envelopes are compared to contemporary building envelopes with the aim of finding out how influencing factors have changed due to technological demands. The study concludes by presenting a new building envelope concept by transposing vernacular principles to the design of contemporary building envelopes. The study shows that the harmonization of contemporary vernacular building envelope concepts and technological solutions lead us to a more genius loci (Lat. “spirit of the place”) oriented architecture. This paper suggests the evolution and generation of all of the mentioned factors in a matrix system, resulting in a completely new and unique façade solution.