Building envelope

Ductal® has been used in many building envelope projects, such as façades, cornice outlines and floors.

Ductal® has enabled the novel creation of vegetal outlines on mesh panels using real leaves as imprints at the bottom of molds. Large-size panels will cover the facing of a nursery school in Franche Comté, France.

British architect Duncan Lewis chose Ductal® for the renovation of the concrete facing at the Pierre Vernier nursery school in Ornans, a small village in the Doubs region 25 kilometers south-east of Besançon.
The aim was to cover the walls in which large picture windows were set with concrete meshes which would vary the light inside the building. An artistic approach was decided upon for the mesh bay surrounds designed in the shape of tree leaves which would cast shadow effects inside the classrooms.

The fineness of Ductal® made it possible to create 23 large-size mesh panels (1.70m wide by 3.60 or 4.60m high) with a thickness of only 3.5cm, fixed to the walls by means of simple threaded rods.

Thoroughly familiar with the material and its remarkable aesthetic qualities, precast producer Jousselin, chosen to manufacture the mesh panels, proposed the architect to decorate them with leaf imprints.
The motifs were produced by molding directly from actual vegetable materials placed at the bottom of the molds and covered with protective polyane film and concrete.

Architect Edouard François has designed a vegetation-surrounded building in the ZAC in Asnières (Hauts-de-Seine), where the balconies are adorned with 4-foot high concrete flowerpots which serve as railings.
The pots contain bamboo, giving the residents the impression of having their own private garden as they look out from their windows.

The architect specified Ductal® for the flower pots because of its ductility, mechanical strength and impermeability (providing durability in the moist atmosphere required by the plants).

The smooth, thin pots (only 2.1 cm thick compared to at least 7 cm for conventional concrete) only weigh 120 kilos empty, which lightens the live load on the balcony slabs.

Ductal® was used to built the vast yet extremely thin panels spanning several square meters which were designed to face the outside walls at the Rhodia research center in Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis).
The ductility and high flexural strength inherent in Ductal® were exploited to create panels covering up to 4.40 m² surface area for just 20 mm thick.

These panels were cast flat, in coated formwork which provided a wide range of textures (smooth, grainy, ribbed); aesthetically interesting with the use of rough concrete.
Once stripped, the panels were stored in crates then transported to the project and attached to the load-bearing walls.

The façades at the headquarters building for the Havas group in Suresnes (Hauts-de-Seine) are faced with concrete gridwork now 30 years old and with some parts that have greatly deteriorated.
By choosing Ductal®-FO, to produce the new gridwork panels the demanding feasibility, ease of use and aesthetic constraints were all met.

The Ductal®-FO panels blended perfectly with the older structures and kept worksite operations to a minimum while providing high strength for the railing structures.

Many of the thirty-year old precast concrete elements on the façade on the National Dance Conservatory building in Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis) deteriorated with time and had to be replaced.
In all, eight large-scale (4.50 m by 1.80 m) elements were made with Ductal®.

The advantages provided by Ductal® met the need for building structures which corresponded to the initial aesthetic choices which met current standards for strength. Size constraints (7 to 8 cm) also limited the reinforcement possibilities.

Combining aesthetics and performance was the ambitious objective for the acoustic panels on the underground rail station in the Principality of Monaco.
The station walls had to be faced with lightweight, thin acoustic panels with perforations to trap the noise reverberation.

In addition to the demanding aesthetics and acoustic performances, the panels also had to stand up to outside elements, in particular, graffiti.

Ductal® met all of the constraints. Due to the material’s extremely fine components, holes measuring only 1.5 cm² were created when the material was cast, facilitating the absorption of the noise and diffusing it toward the underlying rockwool.

In addition, the Ductal® panels, which measured an average of 2.30 m by 1.80 m, with 20-mm thickness in the solid areas and 15-mm thickness in the perforated areas.
The panels are nonflammable, were easy to install and provide highly aesthetic surroundings for the station and its users.