What's in a facade? For those outside the architecture and design profession, the function, importance, and commonality facades play in the built environment might not be so clear. But the exterior wall, or "face" of a building, in fact, plays a crucial role in conveying a building's structural design as well as the artistic intentions of the designer. 

Because the look of facades has dramatically changed over time to become more sleek and streamlined, thanks to material exploration and advances in building technology, it's easy to forget the amount of detail, and intention that goes into design.  

Despite this trend, especially within bustling urban landscapes, facades create opportunities for buildings to be loud, imposing, simple, or decorative. Regardless of their visual intention, however, facades also have the power to prompt the general public to look and notice the built environment around them. 

Architectural techniques and methods aren't necessarily topics that can be easily explained and disseminated to the public. However, various firms and studios continue to use facade design as a way to connect and encourage the public to see and experience structures around them. French 2D, for example, use large-scale building graphics as projects that help present this graphic work. Through projects like Kendall Square they wrestle with the relationship between surface and volume, drawing, and building.

Tasked with creating a graphic facade intended to wrap around an existing parking garage, the studio wanted to explore notions of how architectural drawings could be used as "characters" to play along with the visual perspective of the existing structure. Upon talking with sisters Jenny and Anda French, both expressed their enthusiasm for utilizing facades to show how visual relationships can be created between large-scale canvas and functional facade. "We used a pattern of multiple scales, transparencies, and figures to play with distance, depth and character." Facid North America helped make the 26,000-square-foot fabric mesh facade system in collaboration with Design Communications, who handled the engineering and installation. 

Jenny shares, "really it's about seeing together. Our goal was to see how we could design a graphic that would mediate surfaces."Anda chimes in, "We are most interested in the moments of tension in architectural and graphic works where new, imagine, or recaptured depth emerges and can redefine a project."   

Known as a bustling hub for tech companies, lively art scenes, and a place for people to dine and explore, Kendall Square is an area already budding with visual stimuli. However, the sisters wanted to do more than simply create a "garage cover." Instead, the studio looked to design a pattern that could transform across scales and speak to its surrounding environment, reflecting the location of the project within the residential neighborhood and the growing technology hub of Kendall Square. "In this project, we are playing with the relationship between the drawing and the building," shares Jenny. "There's a scale of details in architectural drawings, and we wanted to show how scale could be a part of the graphic by using imagined and recaptured drawings of the project." 

"We actually grew up in the area," Anda shares. "We remember going down to the movie theatre as kids and parking in that very parking structure. We've seen how the area has changed over the years. So for us this project was a bit personal." Both discuss how the exploration of facades not only changes the look of forgotten buildings that have faded into a cityscape, but how facades also have the power to punctuate a city's urban landscape through the use of shape, color, and pattern.

When asked if people would understand their design, both sisters explain they do encounter moments of miscomprehension. "We both understand our work falls under many categories. From an academic sense, people who are familiar with our approaches understand it. However, there's always another group who doesn't. In the end we're really curious about exploring methods and drawings" 

The sisters discuss how this playful and technical approach to the work, especially with this project, is something they wish to explore more. "We want our work to be accessible, legible, and whimsical...but we also understand our work is a bit out there" (they laugh). Anda shares, "We love this concept of imagining the building performing behind the screen. The graphic we designed isn't random. There's this sensitivity behind the graphics that allows the building to develop a new relationship with its environment."