Aluprof Support the UK’s Building Awards

Aluprof UK has supported the Building Awards held in London since 2018. The event continues to be the construction industry’s premier event and is attended by the main construction companies in the UK to celebrate the best of the UK’s Construction.

At the event, the Aluprof team and their guests were delighted to see that three of the prestigious project awards on the evening used Aluprof aluminium systems to complete their facades.

Held at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London’s Mayfair on the 1 November, the event this year was hosted by Jimmy Carr and was attended by more than 1,100 people.

Chloe McCulloch, Editorial Director at Building, says: “The judges felt truly uplifted by the quality of the submissions this year, pointing to the resilience of this industry in the face of unprecedented headwinds.”

Sponsoring the ‘Building Magazine Project of the Year’, Aluprof UK was delighted to present the award to the Houlton School project in Rugby by the team Urban&Civic, Morgan Sindall Construction and van Heyningen and Haward Architects. The project uses Aluprof’s MB-70 window system which was installed by Dotcom Glazing. The former Rugby Radio Station building was redesigned with further listed buildings on the site to form the new state school delivered by the private sector.

The ‘Refurbishment Project of the Year’ winner was the Bodmin Jail Hotel entered by CField Construction. This project takes a grade two listed derelict and dilapidated 18th century Cornish Prison which is then converted into a seventy bedroom, boutique four star hotel.

Each of the bedrooms has been formed using three former cells and retains many of the building’s original features, such as the window bars, stone floors, walls and ceilings, with many further features of the original prison woven into the building fabric.

Aluprof UK supplied their MB Slimline window system used for the cell windows which is a slim sightline aluminium system which looks like a steel window system but incorporates a full thermal break.

The ‘Digital Excellence Award’ winner, entered by Sir Robert McAlpine and Mace, was The Forge in south London’s Southwark. Designed by architects Bryden Wood, introducing a raft of digital technology proposals which enabled Landsec to achieve its innovative ambitions for the scheme.

The Forge aspires to be the first commercial building constructed and operated in line with the UKGBC’s net zero definition and energy reduction targets.

It comprises two new office buildings and a public courtyard. Located on Sumner Street, The Forge is a Landsec office development located just behind Tate Modern in London and is one of the most innovative construction sites in London, pioneering several new construction methods fit for the decades ahead.

Breaking new ground, the project will be the world’s first large-scale office scheme to be built using a standardised “kit of parts”, in an approach known as ‘platform design for manufacture and assembly’ (P-DfMA), which applies the advances made by the manufacturing industry to construction.

The unitised curtain wall used on the project was designed in close collaboration with Bryden Wood, which allowed Aluprof to develop a highly-efficient facade unit.

The full-size units have been rigorously tested in Aluprof’s Research and Innovation Centre in Ogrodzona where they passed air leakage, impact, wind resistance, and water penetration tests. The units were manufactured in Poland and transported in purpose designed, reusable stillages which were then lifted to the floor plates using a combination of large material hoists and tower cranes for installation by specialist installers NACWL.

A key feature of the stillage design was to protect the units from any stress and impact during transportation and lift. The new bespoke system has been named as MB-SE120 and has a UW value of <1.3 W(m2K).

Aluprof recently held its fourth International Building of the Year awards in Warsaw – read about that here.