Snow and ice falling from building facades can pose serious safety risks to the public and can place architects, owners, and engineers in a position that is vulnerable to litigation. Design trends such as large mullions, projecting trim, sloped or articulated walls and glazing, and an increased use of shading devices provide greater surface area for ice and snow to collect. Improvements in building enclosure energy performance can also result in colder exterior surfaces on which precipitation can freeze. Potentially as important, increasingly severe and erratic climate patterns (more intense storms, faster temperature swings, etc.) can place new stresses on building facades. Despite these risks, there is little consensus in the industry on the best strategies for mitigating the buildup and shedding of these winter hazards or on standards for testing a facade's performance as it relates to falling snow and ice. This paper evaluates several mechanisms that enable snow and ice to accumulate on and fall from buildings. Using traditional snow retention designs for roofs as an introduction, we focus on how snow and ice interact with facade elements and discuss how contemporary design trends, improvements in performance, and changes in climate patterns contribute to the problem. We review the lack of industry guidance for designing and evaluating snow and ice retention systems. We present several case studies, including research and laboratory testing and project-specific mock-up testing that our firm has performed. We discuss how the results from this work can help inform the development of design strategies to mitigate snow and ice issues on building facades. The primary goal of this paper is to help build consensus on the need for more industry guidance to address snow and ice hazards on building facades and present some first steps toward the development of this guidance.