Do you know your brise soleil from your glass louvres? If you are dealing with an architectural project, the first thing you might like to do is to make sure you understand the key terms that are often thrown around. Beneath the complex language often lie a few easy concepts that, once explained, are really quite straightforward and are likely to be very useful for your project. If you would like to be confident when talking to an architect about external louvres, this article should be of some help.
The phrase ‘brise soleil’ is from the French, meaning ‘sun breaker’. The term refers to all sorts of permanent sun-shading techniques, and the beauty of the technique is the range of architectural strategies that come under this umbrella – from the basic patterned walls used by Le Corbusier to the vast mechanical, pattern-creating devices of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. In its standard form, this sun breaker is basically a horizontal projection attached to the sun-side façade of a building. Façades with a large amount of glass can be in danger of overheating during the summer, and fitting a brise-soleil is a very good way of stopping this from happening. The structure can be further tailored by incorporating louvres, which prevent high angle summer sun falling on the façade, and allow low-angle winter sun to provide passive solar heating.
Glass is one of the most widely used and multifunctional building products there is. It can be used for many purposes, from creating striking glass façades to elegant internal screen solutions. Glass louvres are used to control solar heat gain within buildings, and have traditionally been tinted to give the desired effect. More elaborate finishes are available, too. Ceramic frits, for example, involve baking a type of paint onto the glass. These type of finishes create a more exciting appearance while reflecting the sun’s heat and helping to maintain an appropriate interior temperature. These days, glass louvres are taking on a more active role in buildings than ever before, with light redirection and photovoltaic systems allowing for several different functions. These louvres can offer building owners and specifiers realistic solutions in terms of creating environmentally friendly buildings by minimising the need for air conditioning while providing renewable energy sources as well as shading.
Basic external louvres, on the other hand, are usually mounted in the vertical, with a row of horizontal blades shaped and positioned to minimise the ingress of water. With largely simple functions such as providing shade from the sun, the brise soleil, glass louvres and the like should not provoke confusion. Once you know what they are and how they work, it should be fairly simple to assess which solution would be right for your project.
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