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Hemp on the wall or vintage concrete? Huge glass windows that can be slid aside with a single finger or frontage with a parametric look? A glance at the most interesting innovations at BAU 2015.

At this year’s BAU in Munich manufacturers didn’t really seem to have that much thirst for the future. The industry is stuck between pragmatism and risk minimization, which impacts on architecture for sure.

He’s not really interested in skylights. But in the third part of our tour of the “BAU” trade fair in Munich, Amandus Sattler discovers that there are in fact some well-executed specimens out there, such as those developed in collaboration with Foster+Partners. He also finds out that you can’t tar all drainage systems with the same brush either, that no two types of paint are the same, and that “green PVC” is really quite an attractive option.

What exactly are architects interested in when visiting the BAU trade fair in Munich? We decided to find out. Robert Volhard joined Amandus Sattler, founding partner of “Allmann, Sattler, Wappner Architekten”, as he made his way around the fair, and there were certainly a few surprises in store.

As the “world’s leading trade fair for architecture, materials, systems” BAU in Munich offers a wealth of information for architects, planners and anyone with an interest in today’s building solutions, or tomorrow’s. That said, this time round highly customizable standard solutions took center stage while true innovation remained scarce.

In Vilnius a collector of antique books built his family home round the historical walls of a cannon foundry.

In a London suburb the architects at Allford Hall Monaghan Morris designed a building complex comprising residential units ,offices, retail outlets and a giant Learning Center.

"Haus KA", designed by lynx architecture, is a clear cube that consist of only a very few different materials.

A residential house near Munich was given an artificial touch in a bid to better control the wood's natural graying process.

Today, façades do more than merely provide a building with an external boundary or adorn it with an attractive envelope. Above all where energy efficiency is concerned, the function of the façade itself is evolving. And when lighting is allowed to enhance a room without the source of the light getting in the way, the things we are not forced to see become perceptible.

Façade constructions usually consist of two individual components which often have to be laboriously adjusted to one another to satisfy the developer's aesthetic requirements and functional demands. But it can be done differently.