The award was presented during the JEC Composites Show 2011 which took place on 29-31 March in Paris.
The Sheraton Hotel at Malpensa airport opened in July last year. The composite cladding solution was provided by architect King Roselli Architetti of Rome.
“A key feature of the design is the overall shape of the structure; it’s more like an object rather than a building," says architect Riccardo Roselli. "The concept of the hotel is based on a large folded casing wrapped around modules containing the rooms and achieved by applying an outer skin made from a glassfibre reinforced composite material.”
Italian company Progettazione Costruzione Ricerca (P.C.R. Srl) manufactured the composite sheets making up the outer skin using a pultrusion process. The skin has a quartz finish completed with P.C.R.’s proprietary Qflex™ technology and is water-repellent. The outer surface is clad in a white-grey film.
“The individual sheets were produced in 22 m long, 1.4 m wide strips and could be easily handled on a busy construction site,” reports Emmanuelle David, Business Development Manager, Building and Construction at 3B. “It was a great challenge over such a large surface to avoid visible joints between the sheets which are subject to expansion under extreme temperatures and changing weather conditions.”
The surface was also shaped to form bi-directional curves on the top of the roof, against the hotel front, which is 420 m long and 14 m high.
3B, headquartered in Belgium, develops fibreglass products and technologies for the reinforcement of thermoplastic and thermoset polymers.
