RAINFALL AS DESIGN VARIABLE IN FAÇADE PRESERVATION

Near Knaresborough in England, Mother Shipton's Cave holds a spring so rich in dissolved calcium that anything left under its flow slowly turns to stone.

Toys, hats, teddy bears, hung there for decades, come out layered in mineral crust. Those objects became site specific manufacts that enriches the cave without looking too disconnected.

This thesis asks if a building façade could work the same way, using rain's own behaviour and chemical content for a free, site-specific ageing that turns façades into weathering archives instead of surfaces to costly repair.

Working with real façades across Belgium, the project uses computational fluid dynamics and particle simulation, in Rhino, Grasshopper, Eddy3D and Kangaroo2, to map where wind-driven rain slows, speeds up, and settles on a building's surface.

The interventions redirect that water toward places where its effects become part of the design rather than a problem.

Belgium
Thesis Advisor: prof. Rachel Armstrong