One of the world’s leading fashion brands welcomes employees and visitors in style with a building façade featuring SEFAR Architecture Vision at its Madrid, Spain, headquarters.
The stunning glass curtain wall designed by renowned Spanish architect Rafael de La-Hoz resembles a three-dimensional checkerboard with alternating panels of clear laminated glass and panels embedded with SEFAR Architecture Vision. Each panel is approximately 11.2ft by 6.4ft and consists of two layers of 8mm low-iron tempered glass laminated with 0.52 mm DuPont SentryGlas.
The Vision product specified for the installation features a high-precision fabric with a mesh opening of 50% and aluminium metallic coating on its exterior-facing side. The metal-coated fabric was combined with DuPont SentryGlas for the open-edged, laminated glass panels.
The reflective aluminium coating allows the façade to come alive with depth and light refraction that mirrors the changing outdoor conditions of the sun and clouds, adding a distinctive dimension to the structure. From the inside, Vision provides building occupants an unobstructed view of the outside world and reduces glare from the sun. It also reflects the sun’s warmth away from the building, leading to a reduced need for air conditioning.
"SEFAR Architecture Vision combined with SentryGlas lends the facade an eye-catching texture that allows it to fit in with the architectural structure of the building," says Rouven Seidler, European Key Account Manager for SEFAR Architecture.
"It addition to its aesthetic features, Vision also reduces the incidence of birds flying into the glass and allows an uninhibited view from the inside, which is unique among other similar glass laminated products."
SentryGlas’ compatibility with the Vision product offers structural strength performance, transparency and edge stability. The product also offers a reduction in the overall weight of the glass panels and enhances the safety of the installation. Its post-breakage performance keeps the glass in place even if shattered.
SEFAR Architecture Vision is a metal-coated precision fabric interlayer, typically laminated within glass or other transparent materials, to create unique aesthetic design possibilities in exterior glass facades, windows and interior and decorative glass partition wall systems.
Vision fabrics are also printable with UV stabilised inks to produce Pantone colours, patterns, and other design effects. With its unique metal coatings and mesh configurations, Vision improves the thermal insulating qualities for reducing solar heat gain while allowing for light transmission and unobstructed views. Vision materials can be metal coated on one or both sides to produce the desired effect.
SEFAR Architecture Vision fabrics are available in six fabric density configurations and each can be coated with six different metal coatings: aluminium, aluminium/copper, chrome, copper, titanium and gold – ultimately providing 36 different combinations for Vision products. They feature plain or twill weaves in a variety of aperture percentages (25-70%) and light transmission percentages (18-60%).