type: facade
role: computational designer
collaboration: SUBdV Architecture
location: Ceará, Brazil
year: 2021

The sou energy facade was developed at SUBdV Architecture. The goal was to generate an ornamental and efficient facade for a building in Ceará, Brazil. We worked with a sustainability team that gave us the optimal angles for each facade; that way, we could use this data as input to start our work. My role was to design options and do environmental analysis using Ladybug under the coordination of Henrique Lattes Borçato.

We assumed that to facilitate manufacturing, all parts used to block the sun should be equal; the material chosen was shingles (ideally made of wood, a sustainable, carbon-sequestering, and locally available material). We designed two options: shingles fixed to an orthogonal facade and shingles fixed to a curved facade. The organic effect was generated by the different angles determined by attractor curves. The inclination changes by a factor of 5 degrees to reduce the number of modular shingles and guarantee that the shape blocks the incidence of the sun.

We also tested inserting a vertical flap in each horizontal shingle in the Northeast and Southwest facades to protect them from solar radiation ß. We analyzed the solstices, with the most critical hours being December 21st at 3 pm (summer) and June 21st at 9 am (winter). Despite that, the client discarded the flaps because the winter sun during the morning is desirable, even in the northeast region of Brazil, which is closer to the equator. In summer, the employees generally finish the working day early in the afternoon. Beyond that, the vertical flaps block the view.

Architecture: BCMF Arquitetos
Rendering: BCMF Arquitetos
Engineering: RCM Engenharia de Estruturas
Envirionmental data: ARES – Eficiência Energética e Sustentabilidade
Parametric facade: SUBdV Architecture – Anne Save de Beaurecueil,
Franklin Lee, Henrique Lattes Borçato and Camila Calegari Marques