JFDE Special ICAE 2015

Dear Scientists, Engineers and Designers,

We are proud to announce that the Journal of Facade Design and Engineering is becoming a firm partner for the distribution of scientific knowledge of the ICAE International Congress on Architectural Envelopes, organised by Tecnalia San Sebastian. Tecnalia is one of the founding members of the European Facade Network EFN, and this partnership supports the development of JFDE with regards to the discipline of facade design and engineering.

This issue of JFDE is dedicated to ICAE 2015, the VIIth edition of the congress. The contributions have been carefully selected from 32 abstracts, submitted to the scientific section of the conference. Subsequently the finished papers have been subjected to the regular blind review process of the journal. At this point, we want to thank our special editors Julen Astudillo and Jose Antonio Chica for their effort to make this partnership happen.

The paper contributions show an interesting selection of approaches to innovative materials, form finding, simulation and climatic concepts. This demonstrates the special character of the discipline we are working in, bridging research, design and practice.

Facade Design and Engineering is a peer reviewed, open access journal, funded by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research NWO (www.nwo.nl). We see ‘open access’ as the future publishing model. But it certainly requires new financial models which we will have to explore over the coming years.

The editors in chief,

Ulrich Knaack

Tillmann Klein