Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/137453
Looking Up! European influence continues to spread across the roofing and cladding materials sector by Godfrey Budd I s the era of glass condo towers coming to an end? It seems unlikely, given the sheer number of enthusiasts who seem hard-wired to envision the addition of one or more of these shiny structures to the landscape as the appropriate culmination of any high-rise residential project. Some may like the esthetics of all-glass, but the bottom line could also be a factor in their popularity with some developers. As Andrew Rogers, president of Sound Solutions Inc., points out, steel and glass buildings typically cost less to build. Rogers is not the only cladding specialist to note a big disadvantage of glass towers. With only a very modest R-factor, these towers lose heat in winter and warm up in the summer sun. That can mean heavy demand on the HVAC system. Glass towers could also be encountering more pockets of resistance. A story earlier this year in the New York Times told of a minor groundswell of opposition to a new glass condo tower construction in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Closer to home, Rogers points to several recent projects, mostly ones where the owner/developer is also the operator, which have been clad with NBK Architectural Terracotta, supplied by Sound Solutions. They include municipal buildings, university colleges and schools. "There's starting to be a trend away from glass," Rogers explains. Fibre C, a cementicious cladding product developed in Europe and supplied by Sound Solutions, is being used on the athletes village for the 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games. The firm also includes Prodema, a wood-based cladding product that can also be used for flooring and interior walls. "Terracotta, wood and concrete are traditional materials, but they're being used today with a modern esthetic," Rogers says. The higher HVAC costs associated with glass towers are spurring interest in alternatives, says Sterling Halliday, director of marketing for Synstone International Ltd. The company manufactures cladding and roofing products, including Synstone Contempo, a line of exterior concrete panels available in three finishes and a range of colours. Synstone Nature, a similar product but with a crushed aggregate surface finish, was introduced last year. "Sales are starting to pick up," says Halliday. "Synstone Nature is ideal for more price-sensitive projects." Syntone's foam-cored sandwich panels use the same proprietary formulation as the company's thin panels. Each sandwich panel includes an exterior and interior skin of fibre-reinforced concrete. "It can be the entire wall, inside and out, or it can part of a curtain wall system," Halliday explains. Like many of the architectural products that are being introduced to the North American market these days, one from Northern Facades, a subsidiary of Flynn Canada Ltd., is firmly anchored in state-of-the-art European technology. STX is a rainscreen-based system. "It is exclusive to Northern Facades, a fabrication facility that makes STX and curtain wall products, and sells these systems to qualified buyers," says Don Delaney, in charge of engineering and business development at Flynn Canada Ltd. Perhaps the centrepiece of the STX system is its large-format porcelain tile from Italy. "It's made at the most modern plant I've ever seen," says Delaney. "It's incredible how automated the manufacturing process is. Human hands don't touch the product. The principle ingredients are feldspar quartz and clays." Sheets of tile are formed under Above: Sound Solutions' NBK Architectural Terracotta at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York City. Left: Laminum STX with Italian porcelain tile from Flynn Canada Ltd. june 2013 p12-17Roofing.indd 13 /13 13-05-30 1:58 PM