Facades

Facades: Beauty. Utility. Performance illustrates the depth and breadth of the many innovative exterior wall facades that were designed from 2007–2020 at Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG). The featured projects, both built and unbuilt, are explored through photographs, renderings, model images, detail drawings, narratives, and illustrations. Each project addresses a series of environmental concerns, offering site-specific, performative solutions and innovative techniques that harvest resources and maximise efficiencies.

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG) is dedicated to the design of high-performance, energy-efficient, and sustainable architecture on an international scale. The firm approaches each project, regardless of size or scale, with an understanding that architecture has a unique power to influence civic life. We strive to create designs that aid society, advance modern technology, sustain the environment, and inspire those around us to improve our world. We use a holistic, integrated design approach that emphasises symbiotic relationship with the natural environment — a philosophy we've termed "global environmental contextualism." This approach, which takes into consideration building orientation, daylighting, generation of wind power, solar absorption, and a site's geothermal properties, represents a fundamental change in the design process, in which form facilitates performance. It's predicated on the understanding that everything within the built and natural environment is connected, and that a building's design should stem from an understanding of its role within that context — locally, regionally, and globally. Such a pluralistic approach acknowledges the interaction among building systems as well as between those systems and the natural environment and seeks to improve each individual system's performance.

By using this principle in the design of buildings, we can create structures that not only reduce their negative environmental impact, but in some cases, virtually eliminate it altogether. AS+GG's practice includes designers with extensive experience in multiple disciplines, including technical architecture, interior design, urban planning, and sustainable design. Architects also have expertise in a range of building types, including supertall towers, large-scale mixed-use complexes, corporate offices, exhibition facilities, cultural facilities and museums, civic and public spaces, hotels and residential complexes, institutional projects, and high-tech laboratory facilities. The firm was founded in 2006 by partners Adrian Smith, Gordon Gill, and Robert Forest. Today there are 100 employees in offices in Chicago and Beijing.