The thrill of the grille11 January 2008
By
Rory OlcaytoLow cost and easy to maintain, metal mesh is the latest trend in facade design, reports Rory Olcayto
Signalled by the completion of Sanaa’s New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York — a tower of perilously stacked boxes clad entirely with James & Taylor anodised aluminium mesh — the latest easy-to-spot trend in facade design is metal and mesh-faced cladding. The gallery, whose towering form is softened and unified by the uniform aesthetic, is the trend’s flagship project, but architects in the UK are experimenting with similar products too.
Gollifer Langston Architects, for example, is wrapping two layers of the same mesh around eight floors of a new multi-storey car park in Leicester. Designed for the city’s Highcross development, a mixed-use scheme dominated by Foreign Office Architects’ gigantic new John Lewis store, practice director Andy Gollifer says scale, ventilation and efficiency all played a part in its selection, but he was also intrigued by the ornamental quality of the product.
Alison Brooks Architects is creating a mesh-clad surface for its competition-winning design for Folkestone’s Performing Arts Centre for two reasons. First, when the expanded aluminium panels are back-lit, they present a diffused glow, bringing the building “alive” at night. Second, the “up close” look-and-feel of the stuff is reminiscent of sea shells, in particular clams. “If you look at the surrounding Georgian buildings, you’ll see windows with clam shell mouldings above the lintels — we wanted to reference that existing iconography”, explains associate Dominic McKenzie. The gradation of the curved mesh, and the moiré patterns it generates, adds further to the aesthetic.
The 200-seat centre, the firm’s first cultural building, will host live music, dance, theatre and community events, and opens later this year as part of the town’s newly conceived arts biennial. A double-height bar on level one — “the town’s new living room” according to McKenzie — dominates the corner site, its hard lines and flat surface contrasting with the organic, textured aesthetic of the rolled mesh. It makes for a striking and visually expressive appearance.
Maintenance advantages
Alison Brooks Architects, inspired by the glow of shop signs at night, initially looked at polycarbonates to define the elevations, but chose mesh because of maintenance and cost. “And we didn’t want to do another Laban,” says McKenzie. Regarding the finished aesthetic, he notes: “We don’t want to powdercoat it. We like the anodised finish, the industrial aesthetic.”
To clad a series of buildings in metal, Heatherwick Studio decided against off-the-shelf systems, and as you might expect given its background in product design and sculpture, created its own instead.
The bespoke cladding system, a foam-backed, crinkled stainless steel panel, will be applied to eight “sheds” — enterprise units each housing two businesses — that form part of the studio’s competition-winning scheme for Aberystwyth Arts Centre, part of the University of Wales Aberystwyth.
Eight small buildings rather than a monolithic scheme were conceived to avoid interfering with nearby trees. “A small wood occupies the site, and rather than impose a campus-like block, we decided a series of smaller, low-key structures would work better,” says project architect Ole Smith.
Depending on the weather, the sheds will appear almost invisible because the cladding’s crinkled surface will reflect the trees and the light, effectively merging them with the surrounding landscape.
The studio sourced stainless steel the width of cooking foil for the panels. While this made for affordability, says Smith, it meant the steel was neither structurally rigid nor a good insulator, but he and the design team found that by spraying insulation foam on the back of the carefully crinkled surface, these drawbacks could be overcome.
Este es el diseño que finalmente ha resultado ganador tras la votación realizada entre las personas de la empresa, para la elección de la nueva fachada que se colocará en la entrada principal de la planta de Imar en Miranda de Ebro.
