CONCLUSION

The shift from fossil fuels to renewables in recent years has been substantial and steady; as of this writing, the U.S. Energy Information Administration has reported that over the first seven months of calendar year 2024, wind and solar systems generated more electricity than coal for the first time in history (US EIA, July 2024). Ensuring that this encouraging pattern is irreversible, commentators agree, is well within reach. Regulatory measures like New York City’s Local Law 97, California’s Title 24, and Massachusetts’s Stretch Energy Code are driving performance upgrades on all fronts, providing incentives in areas where technical specialists have long perceived market failures. Facades are a building component with enormous potential for practical improvement, either reaching a true net zero standard or making substantive emission reductions in that direction.

GMP’s Schütz, discussing German systems for reusing building components deconstructed and recycled from adaptive-reuse projects (citing the “circular construction” firm Concular in particular), observes philosophical differences between European and North American practices. “We see buildings as material storage,” he says; “this is the idea of cradle to cradle,” guiding efforts to keep track of materials and their roles in orderly processes, relegating the “throwaway mentality,” not the materials, to the scrap heap.

Tucker likewise notes that Atelier Ten admires European architects’ “attitude for starting with the facade, making it a fabric-first approach on the design,” recognizing the envelope’s power to determine overall performance. “The quality of some of the European facade systems and glazing are really inspiring U.S. projects to look at things like Passive House design.... We have a lot of projects that use the Passive House standard as a guide and as a goal, [and] less that have gone through the full certification”; they avoid the cost of the formal process but pursue the metrics anyway, as “they would rather get the low utility bills than the label on the outside of the building.” The same can be said of net zero: the phrase, whatever it variously means to different parties, is less important than the ways it drives decisions toward the essential goal of decarbonization.

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Bill Millard is a New York-based journalist who has contributed to Architectural Record, The Architect's Newspaper, Oculus, Architect, Annals of Emergency Medicine, OMA's Content, and other publications.