Airport Stainless Steel Cable Assemblies/Mesh
Company | Carl Stahl |
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Date | 28.10.2013 |
The region around Newcastle upon Tyne in North East England now boasts a new landmark. 3DReid Architect's innovative Air Traffic Control Tower at Newcastle International Airport is absolutely unique. X-TEND, by Carl Stahl, was used to create the transparent outer skin of this architecturally iconic building.
The significant growth in air traffic and increasing importance of Newcastle International Airport made a new tower an absolute necessity. Over five million passengers a year begin their journey in Newcastle, travelling to more than 80 destinations worldwide. The old Air Traffic Control Tower, dating from 1966, was simply no longer able to cope with these new requirements. Equipped with state-of-the-art air traffic control technology, the impressive 46-metre-high Air Traffic Control Tower is now situated on the accessible north side of the airfield. Its new site, at the runway's midpoint, guarantees a perfect view of the entire airfield as well as over the Tyne Valley and Northumberland right to the coast.
The circular base of the tower accommodates a lobby, offices, training and conference rooms, as well as approach control and plant room over two floors. The state-of-the-art control centre for the visual monitoring of air traffic is at 35 metres.
A unique construction consisting of around 44 tons of zinc-coated steel forms the framework of the hyperbolic-spiral-shaped tower. The focus of the striking design by 3DReid is a twisting latticework structure with concave sides, tapering towards the middle, and opening out again towards the top, wrapped around the concrete core of the tower.
A delicate veil of X-TEND stainless steel mesh by Carl Stahl nestles against the latticework from the inside giving the impressive building a feeling of lightness. Depending on the perspective and fall of light, the X-TEND cladding creates different reflections and views. The result is a fascinating interaction of opacity and transparency
The X-TEND cloak around the Air Traffic Control Tower in Newcastle serves both an aesthetic and functional purpose at the same time, as well as keeping out the birds. In addition, the innovative combination of a steel construction and X-TEND enables completely new and inexpensive façade solutions in comparison to solid cladding.
The unusual façade construction presented a particular challenge for the mesh and steel construction engineers. For the very first time, a three-dimensional curved mesh with a surface area of around 2,000 square metres and a mesh width of 40 millimetres was assembled as a second skin. The specialist planners from Officium were integrated in the planning team of architects and structural engineers and, together with Ove Arup, created a number of special solutions for this purpose. The transparent tower façade was assembled by the specialists from Carl Stahl using their very own assembly technology adhering to the very tight schedule dictated to them.
The cladding of the Air Traffic Control Tower at Newcastle Airport has once more given Carl Stahl the opportunity to prove its competence in lightweight construction architecture whilst at the same time opening up a whole new range of possible implementations for X-TEND. A specific vibration analysis carried out on the Tower confirmed the structural and acoustic advantages of the mesh. Without the danger of frequency or noise generation, the stainless steel cable mesh X-TEND can be used outside over large areas with three-dimensional curvature.
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