The integration of decentralised building services into façade components presents advantages from functional and constructional standpoints. However, this integrated approach has not been massively implemented, having only stand-alone buildings and façade concepts as examples. This paper seeks to identify the main perceived problems at design, production and assembly stages of the facade development process, to generate new knowledge based on practical experience; and to discuss the perceived barriers to overcome in order to promote widespread building service integration in façade systems. The employed method was an exploratory survey addressed to professionals with practical experience in the development of façade systems for office buildings, situated at any stage of the process. The survey was conducted from mid-September to mid-November 2015 and was distributed both as an online form and in printed format among several professional and research networks related with façade design and construction. After the campaign, 133 questionnaires were received, comprising a final number of 79 valid questionnaires. Results show that the main problems of the overall process are related to coordination issues among different disciplines and stakeholders, while other problems such as costs and lack of knowledge have more impact on particular stages within the design and construction process.

This paper seeks to present a panorama of cooling related research in office buildings, categorising reported research experiences from the past 25 years in order to identify knowledge gaps and define current paths and trends for further exploration. The general goal behind this research is to support the design of sustainable office buildings in warm climates through examination of past experiences, thus the paper focuses on strategies at building level and specially related with façade design. Peer reviewed journal articles were selected as the source for the study, given the reliability of the information published under peer-review processes. Several queries were carried out throughout three online journal article databases (Web of Science, SCOPUS and ScienceDirect), considering published papers from 1990 onwards. The resulting article database was then explored trough descriptive analysis and in-depth review of some articles to expand on specific topics in order to thoroughly visualise scientific interest and tendencies within the field of study for the last 25 years. As results of the review it is possible to state the high current relevance of cooling research, having experienced an increase of publications under different climate contexts and varied topics ranging from passive to solar cooling, which is seen as a research field on its own. Also, in terms of research methods, software simulations seem to be the primary tool for cooling research, which makes sense for performance driven developments. On the other hand, the main knowledge gaps identified are the need for specific research regarding possibilities for application and architectural integration of cooling systems; the lack of articles addressing some specific cooling strategies, such as the use of evaporative and ground cooling; and the need for more information about the operation of cooling systems, especially taking users’ perception and their behaviour into account.