lgn0306

"Crisp, clean building envelope" surfaces 53-floor office tower at Bourke Place in Melbourne

Vertical curtain walls of laminated glass are increasingly being chosen by architects in Australia as a preferred method of surfacing high-rise commercial buildings. The 53-floor office tower at Bourke Place in Melbourne is one such case.

Bourke Place in Melbourne

When the Melbourne architectural firm of Godfrey & Spowers set out to design the structure, they wanted to achieve a "crisp, clean and pure building envelope", according to Peter Langford, a partner with the firm.

Currently the second tallest building in Australia, Bourke Place incorporates about 170,000m² of reflective laminated glass. The architect's selection of laminated glass for the curtain wall was determined mainly for aesthetic reasons. "Laminated glass offers a flat, distortion-free image which we felt was important to our goal of obtaining the smoothest, clearest façade possible," said Mr. Langford.

The laminated glass, with DuPont^™ Butacite^® polyvinyl butyral interlayer, offered functional benefits as well. Among these are high thermal energy and sonic efficiency since studies showed traffic accounted for higher levels of noise at the building's lower levels. The project architects varied the depth of the inner lite to avoid a potential 'variable shading effect'. External lite thickness remained constant, maintaining a visually uniform façade.

According to Langford, "Laminated glass offered all the attributes we wanted and the flexibility we needed in a predominantly glass high-rise. It enabled us to design a very attractive structure without compromising the building's functionality."