Textile Membrane for Fa?ade Retrofitting: Exploring Fabric Potentialities for the Development of Innovative Strategies

The European building stock demands urgent renovation due to the age of the buildings, their expected lifetime, and their excessive energy consumption, which accounts for more than a third of the EU's total emissions. However, the complexities involved, such as time, costs, and structural modifications, often discourage clients, tenants, and occupants from undergoing a building renovation process. Textile membranes, despite their long history in various architectural applications, have only been employed in facades in the last decades. Their intrinsic properties, such as lightness and flexibility, together with rapid assembly and low maintenance make these materials particularly suitable for facade retrofitting. Therefore, they are worth exploring as a way to promote the development of lightweight and easy-to-assemble facade products that could help overcome the current limitations of building retrofitting efforts. This paper aims to establish relationships between textile membranes and potential building retrofit applications. To this end, this study builds on the categorization of traditional facade retrofit strategies and proposes a new classification for textile facade retrofit products. The methodology includes a comprehensive literature review of textile properties and characteristics, along with a thorough assessment through case studies, of membrane use in facade applications. A sequential investigation leads to the main outcome of identifying three clear pathways for the development of new textile-based facade products for building retrofit.