Protective Facade For Listed Art Deco Building

StoTherm Classic has been successfully used on the renovation of the external insulation system and decorative facade for Glasgow Palace of Art, Bellahouston Park.

Glasgow's 1938 Empire Exhibition was described by the organisers as "the greatest held anywhere in the world since the famous British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924".

Opened by George V1, it was staged over 175 acres of Bellahouston Park and ran for six months at an estimated total cost of £10m.

The event presented a microcosm of the Empire, with all its arts, culture, and industrial products.

It contained over 70 palaces and pavilions, scores of smaller buildings and the gas, electricity, water and drainage services installed in the park would have supplied a permanent city of half a million inhabitants.

Ten sub-stations distributed electricity for the million-candle-power illuminations through 13 miles of underground cables and 240 miles of wiring.

Following the Exhibition many of the buildings were dismantled and rebuilt throughout Britain and abroad.

The only building remaining on the site from the 1938 Empire Exhibition is the Palace of Art, designed by Thomas Tait, of Sir John Burnet, Tait and Lorne.

Developed as a simple Art Deco style the structure comprised single storey double height spaces ranged around an internal courtyard with all external walls built of 14 inch brick.

During the 1950's alterations were made to the building so that it could function as a Community Centre.

The Palace of Art survived in this form until July 2002, when major refurbishment began to convert the building into a centre for cardiovascular training and physical conditioning.

One of the first priorities was to pare back the building to remove many of the extensions previously added in 1950 and to reintroduce a much simpler and symmetrical layout.

The corridors flanking the courtyard were retained for practical reasons although these were virtually demolished and rebuilt to produce a colonnade offering a greater means of interacting with the courtyard by means of full height frameless glazed panels.

The renovated building reopened earlier this year to serve the West of Scotland Area Institute of Sport, with links to the Sports Science facilities at Glasgow, Strathclyde and Caledonian Universities.

In addition the facility will provide club use for boxing, judo and weightlifting.

A seamless, sympathetic finish.

The Palace of Art is listed as a Grade B building by the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland and this, combined with its outstanding Art Deco looks, demanded a seamless, sympathetic exterior finish.

Glasgow City Council had no trouble in choosing StoTherm Classic as the fa?ade insulation system on all exterior walls.

Sto was originally founded in Germany over 150 years ago and is now a major multi - national organisation dedicated to the development of products and systems that protect, maintain and enhance the value of buildings and extend their functional and aesthetic durability.

StoTherm Classic has been defining technical standards for nearly 40 years, during which time over 50 million square metres of facade area have been installed around the world.

It is a completely organic, highly durable, external wall insulation system (EWIS) with unrivalled performance in extreme climates with a shock-proof and impact resistance ten times higher than inorganic systems.

StoTherm Classic reduces heat loss, protects buildings from heat gain and prevents thermal bridging, resulting in far less temperature induced stress on the building envelope.

It also guarantees weatherproofing by keeping out driving rain and snow, yet remains permeable to water vapour - again adding to the service life of the facade.

StoTherm Classic permits virtually unlimited design freedom too, with over 800 through-coloured renders and a variety of textures to choose from.

A system with outstanding performance.

The core of the StoTherm Classic system is a CFC and HCFC free, rigid expanded polystyrene board (EPS), which is bonded to the substrate using a high strength, inorganically bound adhesive mortar suitable for static, even and uneven, inorganic and organic substrates.

The system owes its outstanding performance to a unique cement-free, highly flexible, fibre-reinforced plaster, StoArmat Classic, into which a specially developed reinforcing mesh (Sto Glass Fibre) is embedded during application, making it extremely crack resistant, around four times that of conventional systems.

The attractive, decorative, light grey facade finish at the Palace of Art is achieved with StoSuperlit, an organically bound, ready-to-use natural stone plaster with extremely high resistance to weathering and mechanical stress.

It has been applied here in a grid formation to give the impression of large tiles.

StoSuperlit consists of two grain sizes and can be applied as a highlight or as an all over surface finish.

There are 37 colours in the range, each guaranteeing an individual decorative facade optic.

It is over six decades since this attractive Art Deco building was first seen by the public and, with help from Sto, it should keep its good looks for sometime to come.

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