Challenges the market and creates discussions on the basis of concrete material. This book also focuses on non technological topics. It discusses items such as issues of strategy and the analysis of customer desires and demands.

For The Making Of - the book title's association to film making - the director must have broad knowledge of the technical aspects of producing a film. If a designer / architect aims to reach beyond the basic standard and wants to have full control over the outcome of his work, he or she also needs to cover all the different aspects of The Making Of. This book shows cutting-edge examples of how façades are currently made. But it also reveals where possible innovative developments will emerge from and what the typical problems are in implementing them in the unique building market.

The role of the building envelope - related to the energy performance of a building and the comfort of the user - is significant. This title deals with the practical experience and visions of the specialists, from the fields of architecture, engineering and research, for the climate-oriented building envelope.

The Delft Prototype is a single apartment from a not yet realized Concept House Urban Villa, which consists of 16 apartments on 4 floors. Both the urban villa and the prototype demonstrate the characteristics of high level industrial production with an extremely low ecological footprint, as well as being energy-positive in use, and both are suitable for multi-storey housing. The research, development, production and built prototype resulted in a unique innovation on the Dutch building market: a sustainable energy-positive apartment system for medium-rise energy-positive housing. This scientific report deals with the history, development and realization process of the prototype up to the completion of the building phase, after which the prototype was furnished and the garden landscaped, culminating with the opening of the prototype in October 2012. The development was initiated by Mick Eekhout’s Chair of Product Development at the TU Delft at the specific request of the building industry and was carried out in close collaboration with a consortium of partners from the SME building supply industry. Innovation continues to progress in these partner industries. The entire project was externally financed for the 8 years of its duration. Apart from initiative and natural project leadership, the innovative contribution of the Chair included the design, coordination and integration of the many components into the single coherent entity of the Concept House ‘Delft’ Prototype.

The Ecologies of the Building Envelope theorizes the building envelope as a literal embodiment of the social, political, technological, and economic contingencies which have become embedded within it over the last century, analyzing the historical lineages, heroes and villains that helped define the complex material ecologies we see within the envelope today. While the façade is one of the most thoroughly theorized elements of architecture, it is also one of the most questioned since the end of the 19th century. Within the discipline of architecture, the traditional understanding of the façade focuses primarily on semiotic and compositional operations (such as proportional laws and linguistic codes), which are deployed on the building's surface. In contrast to this, our material and environmental theory of the envelope proposes that the exponential development of building technologies since the mid-19th century, coupled with new techniques of management and regulation, have diminished the compositional and ornamental capacities of the envelope in favor of material, quantitative, and technical performances. Rather than producing a stylistic analysis of the façade, we investigate the historical lineages of the performances, components, assembly types, and material entanglements that constitute the contemporary building envelope.