Located at the entrance to Hamburg’s legendary “Große Freiheit” street, the AIDA building is the creative think tank for entertainment programmes for all of AIDA’s cruise ship fleet. Designed by architects Renner Hainke Wirth of Hamburg, the glass façade is a truly remarkable sight, with its many different shades and tones of red.
The builder, August Prien, demanded excellent quality in all aspects of the building’s construction. One critical aspect of the building’s design is the glass façade, which comprises 500 individual pieces of glass, each with its own unique design. These individual glass panes had to be produced and delivered to site in exactly the right sequence, as defined in the specification.
Valerie Aunet , SentryGlas® Expressions™ Global Product Manager comments: “SentryGlas® Expressions™ technology enables you to print onto interlayers using high-resolution ink jet printers with specially formulated inks to create an image-carrying safety glass interlayer. This patented imaging system for decorative glass enables virtually any image – a design, photograph, solid colour or continuous tone – to be reproduced in laminated safety glass.”
SentryGlas® Expressions™ is available through a global network of trained licensees that can supply printed PVB using this new technology. FLACHGLAS Wernberg, a licensee of SentryGlas® Expressions™, was responsible for producing the laminated safety glass façade for the AIDA Entertainment building. Using SentryGlas® Expressions™ Technology branded as its own SIGLA® Motive technology, FLACHGLAS Wernberg produced each of the 500 glass panes – which comprised two layers of heat strengthened glass (one white screen printed) in three different thicknesses – with high resolution motives digitally printed onto the PVB interlayer in different tones of red.
As Paul Gora of FLACHGLAS Wernberg states: “The great advantage of digital printing is that interlayers can be printed on directly without the need for laborious interim steps.
Motives and patterns can be selected and implemented in every desirable colour with resolutions up to 1,400 dpi. Impressive, large-scale designs can be created by sub-dividing the façade into individual design units, which can then be reassembled to form a large-scale overall pattern. You can also combine this with many other glass functions such as thermal or sound insulation and solar protection. Also, compared to other methods of decorating glass, processing time for SentryGlas® Expressions™ is fast, efficient and versatile. During assembly of the glass façade, our client was delighted with our weekly status reports on production and deliveries, as we delivered even quicker than had been agreed.”
Another key benefit of SentryGlas® Expressions™ Technology is its high colour stability (UV stability). Testing of glass panes in the Arizona desert, where the panes were exposed to intensive radiation using concentrated sunlight, demonstrated that only minimal changes in colour occurred. Therefore, it was possible to provide the glass façade for the AIDA building with a 10-year colour-fastness guarantee.
Benefits of SentryGlas® Expressions™:
• Not limited to stock colours or screens as it uses a full-colour palette.
• Enables continuous tones or tonal shifts in any image.
• Versatile technology, particularly when reproducing subtle differences within an image.
• Uses proven interlayer technology to meet safety glass code requirements.
• Proofs can be created in days rather than weeks. Quick and easy to make amendments to images.
• Allows the creation of a wide range of transparency levels within a single laminate pane.
To view picture galleries of other building projects that have used SentryGlas® Expressions™ please visit our flickR gallery:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/glasslaminatingsolutions/sets or follow us on Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/sgexpressions/
For a list of the SentryGlas® Expressions™ Suppliers click here.