Norman & Underwood provided specialist roofing, metal cladding and glazing services to Gleeson on the new Health, Education & Biosciences Building at the University of Loughborough.

One of the main architectural features is the four zinc clad curved ‘sails’. The works involved creating a near perfect timber curve supported on a series of vertical supports followed by the installation of 700 square metres of zinc with a total of four layers of substrate beneath.

The first layer is 25mm plywood decking with horizontal supports including a 120mm thick Rockwall insulation with counter battens. These counter battens are needed to create a void within the system which in turn is vented both top and bottom. This vent is required to generate a constant airflow, which ventilates the back of the zinc, thus eliminating any condensation build up which can affect the overall performance of the zinc. The final layer of timber is a 150mm x 25mm vacuum treated horizontal timbers fixed with stainless steel ring shanked nails.

The external cladding system is formed from 0.8mm thick blue/grey Rheinzink with horizontal standing seams spaced at 500mm centres.

This overall build up had to conform to the architects specified U-values, which in this case was slightly higher than normal, with a U-Value of 0.32. The complete weight of this system equates to 67.23kg per square meter.

In addition, specialist glazing was provided using 388sqm of Sapa Elegance 52 curtain wall system with feature vertical capping incorporating both manual and automatic top hung opening lights, swing doors and automatic entrance doors, using high performance solar control glass with a white screen print to hide the floor slab edges. A ‘30/30’ fire screen was also installed using fire rated Kawneer AA100 curtain walling.