Double-skin facade
type of building facade
The double-skin façade is a system of building consisting of two skins, or façades, placed in such a way that air flows in the intermediate cavity. The ventilation of the cavity can be natural, fan supported or mechanical. Apart from the type of the ventilation inside the cavity, the origin and destination of the air can differ depending mostly on climatic conditions, the use, the location, the occupational hours of the building and the HVAC strategy.
The glass skins can be single or double glazing units with a distance from 20 cm up to 2 metres. Often, for protection and heat extraction reasons during the cooling period, solar shading devices are placed inside the cavity.
History
The essential concept of the double-skin facade was first explored and tested by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier in the early 20th century. His idea, which he called mur neutralisant (neutralizing wall), involved the insertion of heating/cooling pipes between large
layers of glass. Such a system was employed in his Villa Schwob (La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1916), and proposed for several other projects, including the League of Nations competition (1927), Centrosoyuz building (Moscow, 1928–33), and Cité du Refuge (Paris, 1930). American engineers studying the system in 1930 informed Le Corbusier that it would use much more energy than a conventional air system, but Harvey Bryan later concluded Le Corbusier's idea had merit if it included solar heating.
Another early experiment was the 1937 Alfred Loomis house by architect William Lescaze in Tuxedo Park, NY. This house included "an elaborate double envelope" with a 2-foot-deep air space conditioned by a separate system from the house itself.
“Double-skin facade” enters the record as type of building facade. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Double-skin, facade and type can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1242918. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1916, 1927, 1928 and 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “Double-skin facade” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.