A step-by-step working companion to C18 — run the method on a live project, one facade at a time.
This guide turns the masterclass into a working method. Run the five stages in order for every project, and the per-lecture checklists below for every facade. Each checklist item is a deliverable; collected, they become your facade analysis report.
| Stage | Activity | Output |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Climate & Site | Climate basis of design: zone, latitude, altitude, design dry-bulb, peak DNI |
| 2 | Orientation Audit | Orientation decision matrix: device family per face |
| 3 | Solar Geometry | Site sun-path chart with design sun positions + obstruction mask |
| 4 | Glazing & Load | Glazing/device pairing table; quantified per-facade gain (kW, W/m²) |
| 5 | Device Engineering | Shading specification + compliance map |
| Facade | Solar geometry (SA / S. hemisphere) | Primary device | Fallback |
|---|---|---|---|
| North | High altitude near noon, small wall-solar azimuth | Shallow horizontal overhang / louvres | Operable horizontal louvres |
| South | Mostly diffuse; brief low summer flanking sun | Light-diffusing / glare control; edge return fins | Operable internal screen |
| East | Low-altitude morning sun, wide azimuth | Vertical fins / operable external venetian | Solar-control glazing + internal screen |
| West | Low-altitude afternoon sun + ambient peak (worst case) | Deep vertical fins / egg-crate / motorised venetian | SHGC ≤ 0.25 glazing + high-reflectance screen |
Before any blind, louvre or fin is specified, the facade must be understood as a dynamic thermal filter that mediates between the South African sky and the occupied space behind it. This opening lecture establishes the mental model the entire masterclass depends on: every square metre of glass is a two-way valve admitting daylight and solar heat while leaking conditioned air, and the specifier's job is to tune that valve orientation by orientation.
Shading design is only as good as the climate data feeding it. This lecture equips you to source, read and apply the right meteorological inputs for South African sites, moving past generic 'sunny country' assumptions to the genuinely different design conditions of the six SANS climatic zones.
This is the geometric heart of the course. You will learn to read and construct a sun-path diagram for any South African latitude and to extract, for any date and hour, the two angles that govern shading: solar altitude and solar azimuth.
Sun angles describe where the sun is; shadow angles describe what a device must do. This lecture introduces the two angles that translate solar geometry directly into device geometry: the Horizontal Shadow Angle (HSA) and the Vertical Shadow Angle (VSA).
With sun-path and shadow-angle tools in hand, this lecture systematises the per-orientation strategy that defines competent SA facade design. We walk each cardinal face — and the awkward intermediates — and prescribe the device family that suits its solar geometry: horizontal overhangs and louvres for the north, light management rather than heat rejection for the south, and the genuinely difficult east/west problem that demands vertical, operable or high-performance-glazing solutions.
Shading devices and glazing are two halves of one system, and this lecture gives you fluency in the glazing half. We define the three numbers on every glazing datasheet that matter for facade analysis — Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC/g-value), U-value, and Visible Light Transmittance (VLT) — and the Light-to-Solar-Gain ratio (LSG) that captures the spectral selectivity you want.
Analysis must end in numbers a mechanical engineer can use. This lecture shows you how to convert your orientation, sun-path, shadow-angle and glazing work into a quantified solar gain and its contribution to peak cooling load.
Cooling load is the engineer's metric; overheating, comfort and glare are the occupant's — and they are what generate complaints and disputes. This lecture connects facade performance to human criteria: adaptive thermal comfort, overheating risk metrics, mean radiant temperature near glazing, and glare indices.
Every SA facade decision sits inside a regulatory and rating framework, and a specifier who cannot map shading to clauses cannot get a project approved or credited. This lecture decodes the compliance landscape: SANS 10400-XA as the mandatory energy-usage regulation, SANS 204 as the energy-efficiency design standard it references, and the voluntary rating tools — Green Star SA and EDGE — that reward good shading.
Geometry tells you what shape a device must be; engineering tells you how to build it, operate it and keep it working. This lecture surveys the device families and their selection logic: fixed overhangs, fins, louvres and egg-crates; operable external venetians, roller screens and folding shutters; and motorised, sensor-driven systems integrated with the building management system.
Hand calculations size the problem and sanity-check the answer; dynamic simulation proves it across the whole year and underpins compliance and rating submissions. This lecture demystifies thermal and daylight simulation: what an hourly energy model does, the inputs it consumes from your facade analysis, and how to read and trust its outputs.
Analysis only creates value when it is communicated in a form the design team can build from. This closing methodology lecture assembles everything into the two deliverables that carry your work into construction: the facade analysis report and the shading specification.
Application-based questions. Minimum pass mark 70% (7 of 10). Reveal each answer to check your reasoning and the section it draws on.
Assemble the outputs from every checklist above into a single report with this spine: