Topics, ideas, and materials defining building envelope design in 2025

AN’s Facades+ conference series has traveled to cities across North America for 13 years, highlighting developments in building envelope design through engaging presentations from industry-leading professionals. AN Senior Program Associate Trevor Schillaci works on up to 15 of these conferences annually, and has noticed a thing or two about what is trending. For 2025, he has pinpointed aesthetic fads, new technologies, and methodologies, as well as important developments in the push for sustainability that facade followers—and leaders—need to know.

Prefabrication

One popular cost-reduction strategy is the prefabrication of building components offsite. Projects where portions of the facade, or in some cases the entire building, were prefabricated, are said to have lower cost, reduced waste, and improved quality control, ultimately speeding up the pace of construction. In Montreal, ACDF Architecture’s Link apartment building is clad in prefabricated precast concrete panels that reference nearby Victorian architecture with arched and gabled balcony openings. A more extreme example is David Baker Architects’ Blue Oak Landing, an affordable housing complex in the Bay Area that was constructed in just five months using modular units and a prefabricated facade of weathered steel.

Geology-inspired Facades

Facades have long been used as symbolic devices: The exterior of a structure visually can represent the contents and programs of its interior, for instance. Lately, we’ve spotted a slew of projects that draw inspiration from geology. They include two recently completed additions to natural history museums: a new wing of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Gilder Center, by Studio Gang, and an expansion of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History by DLR Group. Both exteriors—one granite, the other glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC)—allude to the erosion of rock over eons with their flowing facades, an apt metaphor to represent the collections within, which span millennia. Other examples use geology as a means of connecting a new building to its surrounding context, such as at Flad Architects’ Torrey View research complex in San Diego, where the building’s GFRC panels cleverly mimic the surrounding canyons.

Emulating Fabric

A related trend within the realm of aesthetics and symbolism is facade design inspired by textiles and fabric. Marketing materials for these buildings allude to “pleating,” which it seems can apply to even a simple corrugated metal facade. One example is Ennead Architects’s recently completed tower for Jefferson Health in Philadelphia. In a nod to the city’s forgotten textile industry, the architects designed a rippling glass facade composed of custom panels. This trend comes as advancements in manufacturing make the complex geometries of fabric more readily reproducible across the facade of a building. In Germany, allmannwappner and Menges Scheffler Architekten wove together carbon fiber filaments to create a screen for Reutlingen University’s School of Textiles and Design, using a novel robotic manufacturing process. Another explanation for fabric’s appeal in architecture is a similar movement within the world of fine arts, where textiles, once relegated to the category of craft tradition, have enjoyed a series of high-profile shows at major institutions. One example: the recent Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art show at The Met in New York.

Expressive Brick Screens

Masonry is experiencing a resurgence following a precipitous decline in use for facades from the mid-20th century onward. Whether designers are interested in its low-carbon properties
or re-creating the historic urban fabric of major American cities, the material is lately appearing with increasing frequency in new construction. One common use—that addresses both
embodied and operational carbon concerns—is the implementation of complex masonry screens as a shading device. For instance, at Rice University in Houston, SOM created a screen of suspended brick modules to shade the colonnades of the new Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science. In Philadelphia, Moto DesignShop’s Cadence House goes one step further, using an angled brick screen to not only shade the home but also obscure views of an unsightly gas station located across the street.

Low-embodied-carbon Materials

With a wealth of new carbon-accounting technologies available to architects—and some clients and jurisdictions even mandating building life cycle assessments—many design professionals have turned to low-embodied-carbon cladding materials. This includes a wide range of systems, such as terra-cotta, brick, natural stone, rammed earth, and more. We are also beginning to see widespread adoption of environmental product declarations, often referred to as EPDs, which bring greater transparency to the origins of building products.

Adaptive Reuse

The climate crisis has also spurred a push within the AEC industry to reuse existing structures. Often, renovations to the facade are a central aspect of these projects, as owners seek a new identity for the building. In London, GROUPWORK reclad a brick office building with aluminum panels that resemble the historic facades of Victorian townhomes that once stood on the site. Likewise, Ennead Architects reclad the former Newseum in Washington, D.C., with Tennessee marble, creating a distinctive identity for Johns Hopkins University’s new Bloomberg Center.