Designing Building Facades for Better Functionality

The word ‘facade’ means face in French, and a building’s facade is actually the front of a building and its face. While structural stability, space utilisation, energy consumption etc are some facets that go into designing a good building, facade design patterns are the face and give personality to the building.

A facade that doesn’t convey the building’s personality properly means that it may not display the purpose that it was built for.

These are some key aspects to be considered for designing your building facade.

1. Increasing Customer Traffic

This is important for restaurants, shopping complexes, hotels, and any building open to the public. Glass and transparent fibreglass facades help an outsider to see happy, satisfied customers and give them a glimpse of the inside of the building.

One the other side of this is places like Disneyland and many other theme parks where the outside attracts more people by stimulating their imaginations. An attractive facade can attract attention and convince people to go and satisfy their curiosity.

2. Increasing Privacy

Mirrored glass facades are used on many modern buildings. This serves a very practical purpose for places like banks and any building where privacy is important. There are many organisations where maintaining privacy is key for their operations. Stained and mirrored glass, steel panelling, solid marble and cement are some examples of how many buildings do this.

The real challenge is in making a privacy facade appealing. This can be done with decorative steel panels and sculpted cement.

3. Showcasing Products

Window shopping is a huge aspect of retail and facades can serve to showcase the latest products to passers-by. Potential customers often browse stores from the outside and an attractive facade that showcases your products can bring customers into your store.

4. Differentiating Yourself From Competitors

When everyone sells the same thing, how do you set yourself apart? How do you get people to choose and remember you? What do you do to get people excited to enter your building?

When your building is in a tourist hotspot and there are 100 other hotels on your street, your building needs to stand out and be unique to break through the noise. For many businesses, the building facade is the first point of interaction with the customer. Even when you have guests already booked, having a recognisable face will make your building easy to find, memorable and make people more likely to talk about it when they go home.

5. Environmental Consciousness

There are two areas of your building that can be used to benefit the environment. Mounting solar panels to the roof and facade of your building can help reduce your expenditure and carbon footprint.

Louvre facade systems can also be used as climate control. Closing in warm weather to keep the building cool and opening in cool weather to allow more natural light and let sunlight warm the building. This will also help to save on the cost of heating and lighting

Put Your Best Face Forward

It’s no accident that facade means face. Building facades have a lot of benefits from reducing costs to increasing revenue.

A good building facade can hide flaws and showcase the best elements of a building. However, a poorly thought-out facade design can bring a whole building’s architectural design down.

TOMMA’s patented Facade Fold systems can transform your home, high rise or commercial building. To find out how you can show your building’s personality, call us on 03 9466 1088 or email sales@tomma.com