Vertical enclosure and facade design

The part of the building nobody designs — and that causes the most problems

The structure has a design. Building services have a design. The foundations have a design. On most Brazilian construction sites, the enclosure has an architectural drawing showing the wall thickness and the expectation that the mason will work out the rest on site. That is why cracking, water infiltration and cladding detachment top the list of warranty-service complaints across the country.

Enclosure and facade design is engineering of detail: deciding where the movement joint goes before the wall goes up, defining how the masonry meets the column, specifying the reinforcement mesh at the transition between different materials, sizing the drip that keeps water from running down the face of the cladding. None of this can be improvised later — and every item resolved on paper costs a fraction of what it would cost to resolve from a suspended platform.

Why the standard became a market requirement

ABNT NBR 15575 (the Performance Standard) shifted the discussion from "how it is done" to "what result the system must deliver" — watertightness, durability, thermal and acoustic performance, maintainability. NBR 13755:2017 governs ceramic facade cladding and NBR 7200 governs mortar renders. Together, they turned facade design from a differentiator into a requirement: without it, the builder has no way to demonstrate that the required performance was achieved — neither in a quality audit nor in court.

Scope

• Masonry design for residential and commercial buildings — enclosure in clay or concrete block, with specification of materials, ties and joints, and coordination between elements (window frames, finishes, sills, parapets, among others).
• Industrial masonry design — higher-load, higher-demand systems, with attention to movement joints, anchorages and structural coordination.
• Light Steel Frame (LSF) — interior and exterior enclosures in galvanized steel profiles with cement-board sheathing, with integrated design and detailed interface design.
• Facade design — for adhered cladding systems, we design in accordance with the requirements of ABNT NBR 7200:1998 and/or NBR 13755:2017, including material specification and detailing of components: structural, movement and separation joints, reinforcement meshes, crack-bridging membranes, drips and flashings.
• Execution procedures — planning and detailing of the execution stages, suspended-platform positioning and control of the work performed.

Methodology

1. Critical review of the existing designs — architecture, structure and building services, identifying incompatibilities that affect the enclosure.
2. System definition — selection of the enclosure and cladding typology based on scale, exposure, schedule and expected maintenance cost.
3. Modular coordination and layout — masonry modulation, cladding layout and joint positioning, minimizing cuts and waste.
4. Interface detailing — junctions with the structure, window frames, sills, parapets, flashings, drips and transitions between materials.
5. Specification and procedures — materials, mortars, meshes, membranes and execution sequence, with acceptance criteria and a control plan.

Deliverables