The facade, as the main surface of mediation, contextualization, and representation, has the ambiguous task of controlling the interior environment and confronting the exterior.

The study of the building envelope has become an interdisciplinary subject and a focus of research and innovation. The complexity of façade design is a challenge that Park has been facing for more than two decades, and as it has become a primary issue in project development, it is tackled with a rigorous, creative, and technical-scientific process built on the firm's know-how and the specific skills of all those involved.

In the design analysis, enclosures primarily constitute apparatuses that settle in existing, anthropized "scenographies" with which they create links and dialogues.

The envelope is the first and most stated desire to relate to the context in which the architecture fits.

Facades are also inevitably entrusted with the first impact on the building, the perceived emotional bias, defining its direct expressive communicativeness. The envelope thus assumes in the process the ability to sculpt the identity and uniqueness of the architecture in its external, urban, passerby perception.

Tied to these architectural issues are much more technical areas of insight. The design of the envelope not only goes on to define the dialogue with the context and the perceived identity of the building but also responds to all the needs for environmental and climatic control between interior and exterior; from thermal insulation to acoustic insulation, from protection from external natural and artificial agents to communicate with them and their controlled treatment.

The façade increasingly takes on the appearance of a skin that acts as a "LIMEN" between indoor and outdoor space, regulating the biological rhythms of the building and its inhabitants with the surrounding environment.

The ability of the envelope to function as an organism, "breathing" and regulating exchanges with the outside world places it at the center of research concerning well-being and environmental responsibility.

The envelope is an adaptive filter that controls the brightness, noise, solar radiation, temperatures, visibility, and privacy of users, acting as a major actor in the psycho-physical well-being of inhabitants.

In parallel, the façade is decisive in defining the impact of a building, and its design becomes fundamental to the development of solutions that consider in the totality of factors the contribution of materials, techniques, and the life cycle of each element.

The matrix of all these values cannot be separated from knowledge and technological research; the application of technology is undoubtedly a key ingredient of the process.

Indeed, the language of Park's architecture is composed of functional and innovative elements, which build a language in which each technological element takes on a dialogic and expressive value.

The primacy that technology assumes in Park research translates into a constant study of detail.

To defer to the culture of industry and the mass-produced product, simply to be assembled, the expressiveness of a work without intervening in the definition of the detail would mean giving up one of the fundamental moments of design action in the transition from idea to its realization.

The analysis of technology and the ability to control the constant change of scale; the attention to detail, urban as well as constructive is indispensable for us in design, in a context where the construction industry is composed of increasingly complex and advanced specificities.

Park seeks, through the design process, to analyze, interweave and systematize all issues related to the envelope to arrive at a synthesis of values that can be tailored to the individual project.

We are interested in exploring that way of "divergent thinking" that arrives at alternative ways of using technologies and materials, to see beyond traditional uses, to transfer ideas from other manufacturing and technology sectors, and broaden the field of existing solutions.

For Park, the process is also a system of acquiring information and experimentation, of in-depth tests, scenarios, and possibilities that are collected and stored to generate new potential paths of Research and Innovation. Parallel to design development, various experimental areas investigate possible new technical solutions that may one day be applied in the right context.

A research by: Enrico Sterle