Facade Access Study

Every envelope gets cleaned, inspected, and eventually repaired, and on most projects nobody designs for it: the access plan arrives after the roof is full, the parapet is low, the landscaping blocks the boom lift, and the biggest piece of glass has no route to the third floor. This study asks the question while the design can still answer it.

Workflow

Step 1. Inventory the envelope

Ask, in one message:

1. The elevations: heights, and what each face is made of.
2. What each surface needs over its life, as the owner and the manufacturers state it: washing and how often, inspection, sealant renewal, and whether glass units are replaceable from inside.
3. The ground around each face: setbacks, landscaping, canopies, water, slopes, property lines, overhead wires, and anything a machine cannot drive on.
4. The roof: what is already up there, the parapet heights, and what the structure below was told to carry.
5. Any regulation or standard your jurisdiction applies to suspended or powered access, quoted, or the note that it has not been pulled yet.

Then split the envelope into zones: a zone is a stretch of facade that one method could plausibly serve. Name them; the rest of the study is per zone.

Step 2. List the candidate methods per zone

For each zone, the methods that could reach it, from cheapest to most committed, each with what it needs stated beside it:

• From grade: water-fed pole, ladder, boom or scissor lift. Needs surface, clearance, and reach the equipment's data confirms.
• Rope descent from anchors or davits: needs anchor points or davit bases, structure behind them, a parapet that works with it, and the regulatory ceiling your quoted text sets.
• A building maintenance unit: needs roof space, a track or parking position, structure, and a consultant early.
• From inside: operable or pivoting units sized so the work happens from the floor. Needs the window system to agree.
• Occasional crane or lift closure: legitimate for rare events like unit replacement, but it is a plan only if the street or the yard will actually close, which is a fact to check, not assume.

A zone with no plausible method is the finding, not a gap in the study.

Step 3. Work out the glass replacement path

Separately from cleaning, because it is the question that gets missed: for the largest unit in each zone, how does it leave the building and how does its replacement arrive? Route, elevator or hoisting, the opening it passes through, and what closes while it happens. A unit that arrived by crane before the roof went on has no return trip; say so where it is true.

Step 4. Build the matrix

Zone	Face	Needs	Method	What it demands of the design	Source for reach and rules	Open questions

One row per zone-method pair worth keeping. The demands column is the point of the study: it is the list of things that must be designed in now: the davit bases and their structure, the roof space, the parapet height decision, the ground kept clear, the operable units.

Step 5. Report

The matrix, then in prose: the zones with one method or none, the demands that conflict with the current design, and the decisions that get expensive if they wait. Then the hand-offs, named: loads and anchors to the structural engineer, the certified system to the access consultant, the regulatory text to whoever pulls it, quoted next time this study runs.

Close every run with: this is the design-stage plan; the certified access and fall-protection design is a specialist's, and nothing here substitutes for it.

Step 6. Save, if asked

Ask whether to write the study to a file and where. Write it directly. There is no template and no script.

Rules

• The zoning and the demands table are the only things this skill supplies. Every reach figure, load, and rule carries a named source: the equipment's data, the engineer, or regulatory text the user quotes.
• Glass replacement is asked about on every run, separately from cleaning.
• A zone with no method is reported as the finding, in the first paragraph, not softened into an open question.
• Grade-level methods are checked against the actual ground: the planting plan and the canopy count as much as the setback.
• The regulatory ceiling for rope access is quoted or the question stays open. Never recalled.
• Never present the study as the access design. It reserves; the specialist designs.

Anti-patterns

• Quoting an anchor load, a rope-access height limit, or an OSHA provision from memory instead of asking for the text.
• Assuming the boom lift can drive where the landscape plan put trees.
• Solving every zone with "BMU" without reporting what the BMU demands of the roof and the structure.
• Treating the atrium's inside faces as somebody else's problem. Interior glazing at height is the same study.
• Forgetting the canopy: it blocks the lift and it also has a top surface somebody has to reach.
• Calling the study complete with the glass replacement question unanswered.

Resources

None. This skill is one file. Output is written directly at the path you choose.