Building envelope engineering software#

Our long track record spans back to the 1980’s with projects like Canary Wharf and Petronas Towers today, we continue to work on the highest performing towers, like 1 Vanderbilt, the Hub on Causeway, and Paramount Miami Worldcenter. SOCOTEC’s expertise in curtain wall consulting is unmatched with a host of repeat clients and a portfolio of monumental projects located around the globe. Our experienced staff ensures that each component is properly designed, assembled and installed into a robust building envelope system. The building envelope must function as a barrier, mitigating potential damages and producing healthy, comfortable and sustainable indoor environments. Our consulting services ensure enclosure systems intelligently respond to factors of light, radiation, load, pressure, wind, acoustics, motion, temperature differentials (expansion and contraction), and moisture. These systems present a great opportunity for architectural expression, sustainability and energy reduction in the built environment. SOCOTEC maintains the highest quality standards of design and installation of the walls, foundation, roof, doors and glazing to ensure that they produce a durable enclosure system.

SOCOTEC can be integrated into the designer’s process to fully understand the design vision and goals for the project from early design through construction administration. For more information, click here.Facade systems are an opportunity for architectural expression, sustainability and reduction of energy usage in the built environment.

Building envelope engineering software#

GMS Partners Philip Murray, Ramon Gilsanz and colleagues Zoe Champion and Helena Ariza also attended the conference, noting the networking opportunities and planned workshops to learn about new software applications, among other things. The building’s façade is a unitized aluminum curtain wall system that utilizes traditional curtain wall anchors designed to prevent the transfer of loads between the façade and the structure. The building’s lateral system is comprised of moment and braced frames. In this paper, the potential benefits of utilizing façade members to contribute to the building stiffness is studied by reanalyzing 510 Madison Avenue, a 2012 Class-A steel high-rise office building in Manhattan. This approach of integrating architecture with structural design to optimize building performance and construction embodies the principles of efficiency, economy, and elegance championed by the late Princeton Professor David Billington. Simple modifications to traditional curtain wall slab anchors allow designers to incorporate a structure’s building envelope system into its lateral system, leading not only to improved structural performance, but a reduction in the building construction’s carbon footprint.

Miguel Lopez of GMS presented a paper, Lateral Load Resisting Facades, co-authored jointly by the GMS Structural Engineers and Building Envelope consultants Miguel Lopez, Joseph Blanchfield, Philip Murray, David Kazibwe, Carolyn Bai, Ramon Gilsanz.

The 2019 conference was held in October in Barcelona, Spain and it covered concepts related to material, design, computation, construction, maintenance, history, environmental impact and sustainability of shell, spatial, tension and inflatable structures in all fields of application. The IASS 60th Anniversary Symposium (IASS SYM POSIUM 2019) and 9th International Conference on Textile Composites and Inflatable Structures (STRUCTURAL MEMBRANES 2019) have merged into a joint international conference, FORM and FORCE 2019, aiming to provide a forum for state-of-the-art contributions and fruitful discussion in the broad fields of shell, spatial, tension and inflatable structures.