Energy is more than just light and heat produced from electricity, oil, gas or fossil fuels. Electricity may still come from the socket, but traditional energy sources have long ceased to be the only place it originates from. The wind turbine producer and operator Enercon has built a monumental energy, education and theme centre (EEZ) in Aurich, together with the industrial architect Lothar Tabery, and it works sensationally as public setting for shining a spotlight on wind energy and all its potential. With 73,000 aluminium rhomboid panels on the facade, PREFA produced an impressive exterior for the home base of the alternative energy supplier.
For the ideal material to adorn the facade, Lothar Tabery chose PREFA aluminium rhomboid wall panels, colour natural blank, with a clear varnish. They dominate the overall impression of the architecture. "The PREFA 20 x 20 rhomboid wall panel turned out to be the ideal material to clad the curving, youthful facade, which is in some places inclined by as much as 7°". The kind of unusual building geometries like that of the EEZ can be handled easily with the subdivision into small sections achievable with the panel structure, says Tabery.
"Due to the curvature of the facade in several dimensions it was only possible to mark out the mounting points for the PREFA rhomboid wall panels with the help of a mounting template produced by Spengler," explains Tabery, outlining the difficulties involved in the building. To that the project head of BAU-FA-TEC Bau and Fassaden GmbH in Berlin adds: "For the post and mullion and facade connections it was necessary to cut and appropriately cant a few thousand of the rhomboid panels directly at the construction site. At 25 rhomboid panels/m2 our assemblers mounted some 73,000 individual panels".
Natural blank aluminium was chosen by the architect because of its noble appearance at comparatively low production costs, and also because of the builder's desire to have a permanently metallic finish, which wouldn't change, even when subjected to outdoor exposure. "The foldable basic aluminium material was coated with a special, extremely resistant clear varnish," said PREFA special advisor, Olaf Oetjen. The material can be bent without difficulty, without the coating cracking or blistering, and the fold-in-fold mounting technique makes the facade storm proof. A third of the facade also had to comply with fire protection classification A1. "In these areas the structure consists of a rear-ventilated aluminium sub-construction with consoles and L-sections and a substrate with strip-galvanised, painted trapezoidal steel sheets with aluminium sheet panels as base to fasten the rhomboid panels to," explains Tabery.