Global design practice Perkins & Wills has released a beautiful white paper on balconies for buildings concerned with lowering carbon emissions. It considers thermal bridges and overall design considerations. Balconies are a major heat loss junction in multi-storey buildings, second only to window installation details. (Concrete slab edges, where left uninsulated, are also major thermal bridges.)
The white paper, according to the authors, provides an overview of the key issues, a comparative analysis of alternative balcony connections and a project case study. [… It] aims to arm architects and designers with the knowledge required to advance and advocate for alternative balcony design solutions.
Thermally Broken Balconies Report: Alternative Strategies for Low Carbon Buildings
This white paper is available to view online here. It graphically works through all the design issues and references RDH’s work or other papers for the detailed thermal bridge modelling. Unlike this guide, our work at Sustainable Engineering Ltd focuses on the exact thermal bridge calculations—but there are many other design considerations and it is awesome to have such a great guide to those. I highly recommend you read this.