As well as housing a music and dance school, the cultural centre L’Onde has been designed as a community focus for the small town of Vélizy as well as a draw for nearby Paris.
The exterior cladding materials reflect the interior spaces: glazing for the entrance hall, architectural concrete and metal for the closed auditorium, granite for the block containing the schools and for the façade giving onto the road.
Technical solutions were developed by PMA Parements Métalliques d’Architecture, part of the French Arcelor steel group, that today seems eager to cater for the particular requirements of designers and clients.
“Mass customization” seems the new byword, with made-to-measure components turned out even in small batch production at prices not too far from those of standard products.
This has been made possible by CNC – Computer Numerical Control – production which allows low-cost type variations simply by inputing new data into the operating system.
The metal “Baine” cladding system by PMA, installed by Arblade, is a 1 mm pre-treated undulated aluminium panel. 4,500 square metres of this metal surfacing were laid onto the concrete structure in panels of 420 x 2500 mm.
A key feature of the assignment was panel-fit at the edges of the building. As façades are inclined, this meant that standard panel undulations failed to match their opposite number at corners. The solution was to cut and shape the panels while they were still flat, i.e. not yet bent into curves.
Furthermore, the architect wanted panel fixing devices to be inconspicuously set into the dip of the undulation. This was done by using stainless steel screws applied directly to the cladding material without intervening blocking plates – a solution that allowed assembly of the façade cladding in just two months.
Ingrid Paoletti
Digital
Printed
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