The building skin has evolved enormously over the past decades. Energy performance and environmental quality of buildings are significantly determined by the building envelope. The façade has experienced a change in its role as an adaptive climate control system that leverages the synergies between form, material, mechanical and energy systems in an integrated design.

The PowerSkin Conference aims to address the role of building skins to accomplish a carbon neutral building stock. Topics suc...

This special issue of the Journal of Facade Design and Engineering (JFDE) is linked to the conference FAÇADE 2018 – Adaptive!, the fifth conference that has been organised by Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts within the framework of the European Façade Network, EFN. FAÇADE 2018 is also the final conference of the COST Action TU1403 ‘Adaptive façades network’ (www.tu1403.eu) and dedicated to multifunctional, adaptive, and dynamic building envelopes.

This issue of the Journal of Façade Design and Engineering is a result of the second façade conference, PowerSkin, held on January 17th 2019, in the context of the building trade fair ‘BAU’ in Munich. The conference was organized collaboratively by TU Munich, TU Darmstadt, and TU Delft. All three universities conduct high-impact research and education in the field of building envelopes. The conference featured a mix of practice and education experiences, as well as scientific contributi...