Discussion: Between Fashionable Packaging and Responsive Skin: Trends in Modern Facade Design
Skins consisting of camouflage nets or coloured plastic sheeting, green grass sprouting from outer walls in earth-filled wire baskets, plastic balls sealed in transparent sheeting, expanded metal cladding, rusting steel, and glass printed with colourful patterns are some of the many facade forms one finds today. Leafing through international architectural magazines, one gains the impression that no building material, no form of application, is too abstruse for a facade skin. Even if some of the examples described above are extreme cases of facades that seek to achieve a media effect, buildings and their outer skins are more varied today than ever before, exhibiting an often disparate juxtaposition of forms, materials and colours.
